Summary of headline:
- The development of electronic skin at the University of Colorado Boulder could have implications for improving prosthetic limbs in the future.
- “If you think about what real skin can do, real skin can prevent people getting burned [and] can prevent people getting hurt,” Wei Zhang, a chemistry professor at Boulder and co-author of the study, told Newsweek.
- The e-skin is a thin, semi-transparent material that can act like your skin through measuring temperature, pressure, humidity and air flow.
- “This has quite broad applications, in a sense, to enable sensation of otherwise passive systems,” Jianliang Xiao, mechanical engineer at Boulder who led the study, told Newsweek.
- The new material, which was detailed in a study published Friday in Science Advances,could make better prosthetics, improve the safety of robots in the future and aid development of other biomedical devices.
- For instance, if the e-skin is wrapped around a prosthetic hand, the e-skin would enable the prosthetic to sense for pressure when holding a glass cup.
- Heat and pressure can allow the e-skin to wrap around curved objects easily, such as human skin and intricate robotic hands.
- © JIANLIANG XIAO/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER A section of the electronic skin developed by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder.
- This e-skin has the ability to sense for pressure, which is a key factor for improving prosthetic limbs.
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