Bio Focus: Sensors add touch and feel to prosthetic skin
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artificial skin to sense moisture and to enable the prosthetic skin to feel warm to the touch. Since the ultimate goal is to conhe loss of any limb is devastating, nect the skin of the artificial hand to especially the loss of a hand limits the patient’s nervous system, the team crucial functionalities including eating decorated the multi-electrode array with and handling objects. While prosthetic ceria-coated platinum nanowires to imhands can mimic biological motion, an prove biocompatibility and reduce inartificial “skin” must mimic the mechaflammation. Connecting the electrodes noreceptors (sensing touch, pressure, and to a rat sciatic nerve, the researchers vibration) and thermoreceptors in human demonstrated electrophysiological sigskin to enable real-time feedback as the nal spikes in response to input signals person performs a task. And ideally, the from the pressure sensor. patient won’t be left with cold hands! “The most important driving force A research team based in South Korea of this work is to accomplish an artihas reported a flexible synthetic “skin” ficial skin that seems to be real skin,” that could eventually be used with a hand said Dae-Hyeong Kim. “The next step prosthesis to permit the patient to feel is to continue development [to] emulate heat, humidity, and pressure. This reprethe real mechano- and thermo-sensory sents the first integration of mechanically functions of the human. Another direcoptimized sensor array configurations tion is to apply the current technology within an artificial skin. As reported to larger animals for bidirectional (from in the December 9, 2014, issue of peripheral to central nervous system, and Nature Communications (DOI:10.1038/ vice versa) sensing and actuating loop ncomms6747), the skin is built from the experiments.” biocompatible and elastic polydimethylPaolo Maria Rossini of the University siloxane (PDMS) encapsulating layers of Rome (EPFL), who with Silvestro Micera and others announced last year a method of providing physiologically Interconnection appropriate sensory information to a paHumidity sensor array tient, said, “In principle, the creation Strain, press., temp. of a smart prosthetic sensor array skin instrumented [as reported] could represent a remarkable step ahead in the development of a full-range prosthetic hand.... Having said that, a main problem remains PDMS to be solved: how Heater encapsulation to manage the huge amount of motor and multisensory information ... from different sensory modalities.” Jennifer Gordon Artificial skin comprised of six stacked layers, where interconnected wires of each layer relay signals to external instruments. Bio Focus
Sensors add touch and feel to prosthetic skin
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Reproduced with permission from Nat. Commun. (2014), DOI:10.1038/ncomms6747. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
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