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[ChouGoku]

Stanford engineers have created a plastic "skin" that can detect how hard it is being pressed and generate an electric signal to deliver this sensory input directly to a living brain cell.
Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has spent a decade trying to develop a material that mimics skin's ability to flex and heal, while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain. Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb and replicate some of skin's sensory functions.
Bao's work, reported today in Science, takes another step toward her goal by replicating one aspect of touch, the sensory mechanism that enables us to distinguish the pressure difference between a limp handshake and a firm grip.

The heart of the technique is a two-ply plastic construct: the top layer creates a sensing mechanism and the bottom layer acts as the circuit to transport electrical signals and translate them into biochemical stimuli compatible with nerve cells. The top layer in the new work featured a sensor that can detect pressure over the same range as human skin, from a light finger tap to a firm handshake.

Bao's team has been developing flexible electronics that can bend without breaking. For this project, team members worked with researchers from PARC, a Xerox company, which has a technology that uses an inkjet printer to deposit flexible circuits onto plastic. Covering a large surface is important to making artificial skin practical, and the PARC collaboration offered that prospect.

Optogenetics was only used as an experimental proof of concept, Bao said, and other methods of stimulating nerves are likely to be used in real prosthetic devices. Bao's team has already worked with Bianxiao Cui, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford, to show that direct stimulation of neurons with electrical pulses is possible.
Bao's team envisions developing different sensors to replicate, for instance, the ability to distinguish corduroy versus silk, or a cold glass of water from a hot cup of coffee. This will take time. There are six types of biological sensing mechanisms in the human hand, and the experiment described in Science reports success in just one of them.

But the current two-ply approach means the team can add sensations as it develops new mechanisms. And the inkjet printing fabrication process suggests how a network of sensors could be deposited over a flexible layer and folded over a prosthetic hand.
"We have a lot of work to take this from experimental to practical applications," Bao said. "But after spending many years in this work, I now see a clear path where we can take our artificial skin."

Full article here
With brain controlled robotic prosthetics already existing, incorporating something like this is just the next logical step.

Touch me with your robot hand if old

 

[DiipuSurotu]

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

have created a plastic "skin"

the T-50 were like these they had plastic skin they were easy to spot.

 

[dejay]

Surprised this thread didn't get more responses. We're living in exciting times.

 

[Bunta]

 

[InfiniteBento]

This is incredible. I love learning about stuff like this.

The human body is really fascinating.

 

[chrisPjelly]

That's pretty damn amazing. It's only a matter of decades until researchers are able to replicate all the cells/mechanics necessary for all five senses.

 

[Gordon Shumway]

 

[davepoobond]

sounds cool.

 

[Surface of Me]

I never asked for this.

 

[wanderingprostheyltite]

Interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_HSYB3EPNk

 

[Walpurgis]

Gloves for VR.

 

[Skyzard]

Thanks engineers.

 

[99hertz]

Gloves for VR.

Oh fuck, I didn't think of that. Awesome!

 

[Tesseract]

so it begins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v92K3_f0MUo

 

[M0nochromatic]

That's truly amazing. It's mindblowing that it even exists, nice going engineers.