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Saturday, July 27, 2019

Sensor Based Skin for Prosthetic Touch

New advances in touch.   We experimented with devices on the shelf to let consumers touch-engage with a product.    So this might be a way to quantitatively test the experience?

A sensor-filled “skin” could give prosthetic hands a better sense of touch

The “electronic skin,” inspired by the nervous system, can sense temperature, pressure, or humidity. It could be used to give prosthetic limbs a more complex sense of touch.

Humans are amazing: Your body is a sensing machine, thanks to the roughly 45 miles of nerves inside your body that connect your skin, brain, and muscles. A team from the University of Singapore has now used that nervous system as inspiration to create a "skin" for robots that, one day, could improve their ability to detect and understand their environment.

How it works: Sheets of silicon were covered with 240 sensors that can pick up contact, pressure, 
temperature, and humidity. These are able to simultaneously transmit all this data to a single decoder, and should still work when the system is scaled up to 10,000 sensors, according to Benjamin Tee, the coauthor of the study, which was published in Science Robotics today.

What’s new: Flexible robotic “skin” has been tested in previous studies, but this system is the first to enable many sensors to feed back to a single receiver, allowing it to act as a whole system rather than a bunch of individual electrodes, Tee said. Crucially, it still works even if the individual receptors are damaged, making it more resilient than previous iterations.  .... " 

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