Scientists invent electronic skin that gives amputees a sense of touch through prostheses

Scientists have invented a type of electronic skin that can ‘talk directly to the brain’, allowing amputees to experience a human-like sense of touch through prosthetic limbs.

The revolutionary artificial skin is embedded with temperature, pressure and strain sensors that are converted into electrical signals – similar to how nerve impulses communicate with the brain.

The wearable electronic circuit, known as a monolithic electronic skin, was developed by a team at Stanford University, who detailed their breakthrough in a study published in the journal Science.

Jenan Bao of Stanford University, who was the senior author of the study, said The Independent that next-generation technology can also be used to sense objects and sensations while controlling a robotic limb remotely.

“We have been working on a monolithic electronic skin for some time,” Professor Bao said. “The obstacle was not so much finding mechanisms to mimic the remarkable sensory capabilities of human touch, but bringing them together using only skin-like materials.”

Weichen Wang, a PhD candidate in Bao’s lab, added: “Much of this challenge comes down to perfecting skin-like electronic materials so that they can be incorporated into integrated circuits of sufficient complexity to generate similar of nerve impulse trains and low enough operating voltage to be used safely on the human body.

An electronic skin prototype, which is the thickness of a sheet of paper, is the first to combine all the desired electrical and mechanical characteristics of human skin in a soft and durable form.

The team now plans to increase the scalability of the technology and develop an implantable chip to enable wireless communication through the body’s peripheral nerve.

Other recent e-skin research has focused on robotics, aiming to provide robots with sensory feedback and physical self-awareness.

A team from the University of Edinburgh unveiled a device earlier this year that offers perceptive senses “similar to those of humans and animals”.

A separate 2023 study by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) outlined a type of artificial skin capable of sensing toxic chemicals that could allow robots to detect everything from pollution in rivers to nerve agents and biological hazards.