Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing a wearable electronic device that’s “really wearable”–a stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that’s inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin.
The team describes its new “electronic skin” in a paper published in the journal Science Advances. The device can heal itself, much like real skin. It also reliably performs a range of sensory tasks, from measuring the body temperature of users to tracking their daily step counts.
And it’s reconfigurable, meaning that the device can be shaped to fit anywhere on your body. If you want to wear this like a watch, you can put it around your wrist, If you want to wear this like a necklace, you can put it on your neck.
The researchers are hoping that their creation will help to reimagine what wearable devices are capable of. One day, such high-tech skin could allow people to collect accurate data about their bodies–all while cutting down on the world’s surging quantities of electronic waste.
Those thin, comfortable films have long been a staple of science fiction.
The team’s goals are both robot and human.
To manufacture their bouncy product, the researchers use screen printing to create a network of liquid metal wires. They then sandwich those circuits in between two thin films made out of a highly flexible and self-healing material called polyimine.
The resulting device is a little thicker than a Band-Aid and can be applied to skin with heat. It can also stretch by 60% in any direction without disrupting the electronics inside.
The team’s electronic skin can do a lot of the same things that popular wearable fitness devices like Fitbits do.
The team’s artificial epidermis is also remarkably resilient.
If you slice a patch of electronic skin, all you have to do is pinch the broken areas together. Within a few minutes, the bonds that hold together the polyimine material will begin to reform. Within 13 minutes, the damage will be almost entirely undetectable.
By 2021, estimates suggest that humans will have produced over 55 million tons of discarded smart phones, laptops and other electronics.
The research team’s stretchy devices, however, are designed to skip the landfills. If you dunk one of these patches into a recycling solution, the polyimine will depolymerize, or separate into its component molecules, while the electronic components sink to the bottom. Both the electronics and the stretchy material can then be reused.
The team’s electronic skin is a long way away from being able to compete with the real thing. For now, these devices still need to be hooked up to an external source of power to work.
News Source: University of Colorado Boulder
