A group of American and Korean researchers have created artificial skin in order to give amputees the ability to feel with their prosthetic limbs.
While there are currently prosthetics that let amputees control them with their brain and movements, none previously existed that could send information from the environment back to the user's nervous system, according to Popular Science.
This new skin can sense factors like temperature, humidity and pressure. The team used a flexible silicone material called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to make the skin, adding silicon nanoribbons that produce electricity when squished or stretched and tell whether an object is hot or cold.
Roozbeh Ghaffari, one of the researchers, said the amount of sensors in the skin makes a huge difference because "If you have these sensors at high resolution across the finger, you can give the same tactile touch that the normal hand would convey to the brain," Engadget reported.
The skin was also designed to be elastic enough for users to stretch and move their fingers as if they were real.
Having tested the skin on a prosthetic hand, the team is currently working on a way to connect it to the human nerves so amputees would be able to feel what the skin feels and regain their sense of touch, Popular Science reported. They said amputees with prosthetic hands combined with the electronic skin would be able to shake hands, tap keyboards, touch wet or dry surfaces and interact with others as if they had a real hand.
The researchers' sensitive smart skin is the latest to be developed, with previous projects including one designed by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology with gold nanoparticles and another being created at Georgia Tech with piezotronic transistors, Engadget reported.
The team published the study on Tuesday in Nature Communications.
