SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Disabled people with prosthetic limbs will have the full functional sense of touch and feel in the future thanks to Stanford University scientists' success in creating the wearable "electronic skin," or e-skin, one of the scientists told Xinhua on Monday.
Zhennan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, said her research on stretchable skin-like electronics is currently focused on medical applications such as health monitoring, medical treatment, medical implants and biological studies.
She said her team had made significant advancement in skin electronics by developing for the first time core elements for the skin-like electronics that can adhere seamlessly to human skin or within the body.
The result of the research was published Monday in the international science journal Nature.
One of the major breakthroughs that Bao and her team of scientists had achieved was in enhancing the stretchability of the e-skin, so that it becomes as soft and stretchable as human skin and is more comfortable to wear.
Bao said the current electronic devices that are used as a means of transmitting signal on artificial limbs are rigid and cannot be extended, and that she has been working for years on exploring and designing an organic material that is flexible, stretchable, bio-degradable and self-healable, just like human skin.
To that end, Bao's team proposed in their latest research the use of "intrinsically stretchable polymer materials," whose production they said had been hampered by the lack of what they called "a scalable fabrication technology."
Bao said her team developed a fabrication process that enabled high yield and uniformity from a variety of intrinsically stretchable electronic polymer materials.
"We demonstrate an intrinsically stretchable polymer transistor array with an unprecedented device density of 347 transistors per square centimeter," read the abstract. Previously, structural engineering of rigid inorganic and organic devices usually suffered from reduced densities of devices within an array, according to the research.
Bao said Monday's breakthrough was but a first step, and that if the technology of skin-like electronics is finally applied to the medical industry, it can "give life to artificial limbs" and enable the disabled to move their "legs and arms" freely.
Moreover, the intrinsically stretchable polymer material is bio-degradable and environment friendly, she said, meaning that if the prosthetic limbs are worn out, the skin-like electronics adhered to them will degrade over time without damaging the environment.
As regards the self-healable feature of the organic material, Bao said a cut on the artificial limbs can be healed automatically, just like the natural recovery process of a cut on the human skin.
Elaborating on the wide-ranging applicability of the research, Bao said the material can even be a source for manufacturing the screens of mobile phones.
"Maybe people will no longer fear dropping their phones and ending up with a broken screen," she said.
