Faux Leather

Human skin has millions of receptors. They respond by sending electrical impulses to the brain via nerves. The brain responds by sending back information and telling the muscles to move. Living skin is soft and can be stretched many times.

We were inspired by nature and wanted to imitate it. One day we may be able to help patients regain not only their motor function but also their senses.
– said Weichen Wang, the first author of the study.

It is difficult to repeat the same stretch and maintain electrical conductivity in artificial leather. The new development uses layers of networked elastic organic transistors that sense and transmit electrical signals. The stacked layers are only 25 to 50 microns thick – as thin as a sheet of paper. The nets function as pressure, temperature, voltage and chemical sensors. They convert this sensory information into an electrical impulse. The electronic skin only needs 5 volts of electricity to work.

When the electronic skin of the rat was touched, the impulse was transmitted via a wire to the brain, to the somatosensory cortex, which is responsible for processing physical sensations. The mouse’s brain responded by sending an electrical signal to its leg. This was done using a device that amplifies and transmits signals from the brain to the muscles by simulating connections in the nervous system. The mouse’s foot twitched. It is noteworthy that the movement corresponds to different pressure forces.

In case of trials In humans, the device would not require a wire to be implanted to send sensory information to the brain.. The team recommends using wireless communication between the electronic skin and an electrical stimulator located next to the nerve.

But the new skin still lacks one thing: permanent memory. Human skin remembers how an object feels and can then predict it. There’s another problem: the signal transmission is still too slow to be useful. The next step will be to place more different sensors on the electronic skin to more accurately reproduce the sensation.