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The electronic skin revolution: a new sense of touch | Giulia Spallanzani | TEDxForteDeiMarmi | TEDx Talks | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The electronic skin revolution: a new sense of touch | Giulia Spallanzani | TEDxForteDeiMarmi
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Core Theme
The core theme is the development and potential of electronic skin (e-skin) technology, which aims to mimic and even enhance the human sense of touch by integrating advanced sensors and smart materials with printed electronics.
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Transcriber: Roqia Tobar Reviewer: Emma Gon
As a scientist, what I do and I like are experiments.
So let's start with an experiment today.
Every one of you, please take a finger from your favorite hand
and place it on the palm of your other hand in the way you like.
Now experience.
You probably feel a little warm, maybe sweaty.
Maybe your nail is too long and it hurts a bit while it touches your palm.
Or maybe you put tons of sunscreen today
and you feel oily skin sensation.
With these sensations, this is the magic of our skin.
Now you can rest your hands.
Skin is able to feel the surrounding environment
and send information about it to the brain,
such as, for example, temperature.
So whether you’re touching something cold
or feeling heat coming from something you put on the fire,
but also textures or pressure.
And the brain is then able to take this information and process it
and take decisions such as don’t touch the hot pot on the fire.
All this is possible thanks to thousands of tiny structures,
which are called receptors,
and which are spread all over our body
and can gather the stimuli that we have from the outside world
and translate them into electronic signals
that are then relayed to the brain via the nervous system.
Now, the density of such receptors changes very widely throughout the body,
and we have that in some parts of the body, such as fingertips,
we can have up to several hundreds
of such tiny structures per square centimeter.
So to give you an idea of what this means,
if we get a surface area of a €1 coin,
we have that in that area on our fingertip
that will be more than a thousand of this sensation capturing receptors.
Moreover, these receptors,
regardless whether the brain will actually use
the information that they are sending,
they will anyway gather this information 200 to 1000 times per second.
So from the beginning of this talk,
a thermal receptor in your hand has felt
the temperature around it more than 30,000 times.
That’s a pretty busy highway of information, don’t you think?
What if I told you that researchers are nowadays actively involved
in finding ways to develop and design a device
that could actually mimic our skin sense of touch
or even improve its capabilities?
Well, this is a pretty complicated task, as you may imagine,
given the extreme complexity of the natural inspiration
that we have, which is skin.
But we are tackling it one bit at a time,
starting from wearable devices and patches or smartwatches
that can take information from the environment,
but also from the person wearing them.
And then we can, for example,
analyze these signals through an app on your smartphone.
But the goal we have is that of creating a device
that could actually be used on our natural skin
or even used as an artificial skin on a prosthesis, for example.
To do this, we need sensors
which are somehow the electronic alter ego of receptors.
So instead of being made of biological tissues as receptors are,
sensors are made of electronic components,
but as the same way as receptors,
they take the stimuli from the outside world
and can translate it into signals
that we can again see in an app on your smartphone.
Using printed electronics,
we can then integrate such sensors
and create devices that are able to do that.
So we can print them
on top of a flexible and conformable surface
that is then connected to a more bulky and traditional electronic part
where the signal analysis and power are located
and we can create patches such as this one.
Yeah, I just got it out of my pocket.
Now we can try this on and we can actually see how it works.
So this is a patch to monitor vital signs of a person wearing them.
And I'm going to try this on and we're going to do a little experiment again.
So, yeah, while I wear it, I can tell you you will see five different signals.
One is the heart rate or the electrocardiogram signal.
One is the respiration rate, and then there are X, Y and Z accelerometer,
which is just a movement in the three directions.
And this patch is used to early detect diseases,
cardiovascular diseases, but also is used to...
I don’t find... it’s here.
It is used to decrease the pressure on the health care system.
And this is possible, because it can reduce the hospitalization time of people,
for example, after a surgical operation.
So then you can send them home earlier
and you can have them monitored remotely by the doctor,
while they’re wearing the patch up to 15 days, even.
So, if we now want to start the...
Yes, okay, here is the signal.
Yeah, so these patches are all printed patches
and you have different electrodes that are actually measuring the signals.
And yeah, what you see is the raw data,
where we can see, this is actually already a pretty good data.
But what I personally find the most interesting
is the combination of these printed electronics,
of which we have just seen the capabilities with smart materials.
Smart materials are materials that respond to changes
in the surrounding environment and perform actions.
So, for example, they can heal themselves.
So when you cut through a material,
it can actually reimagine this cut or change shape upon stimuli
such as, for example, temperature or light exposure.
And using these materials,
we can create sensors such as the one you see in this video here,
which is a self-healing material that is used for a strain gauge.
So we have a sensor that senses deformation
and is mounted on top of a junction
in a robotic hand and measures in real time
the opening and closing of this robotic hand.
So if you want to think of an application for this,
you could, for example, imagine it
being mounted on a prosthesis and the person wearing the prosthesis
being able to grab an object and understand
if they’re doing so, even without looking at it
just by the feedback that our sensor provides.
So electronic skin or e-skin, as they are called,
have a wide variety of fields of application.
So we have seen one that is a biomedical field in wearable devices or prosthesis,
but you can also use them in virtual reality
and haptics to create more intuitive
and non-invasive human machine interaction interfaces.
So if we want to dream with our eyes open,
we can think of a device that would integrate all these smart materials
that we have just seen together with printed electronics.
And we could with that, with such a device,
we could take stimuli from the outside world and measure those
while also measuring signals from the person wearing this device
and at the same time also triggering the true skin receptors
that we talked at the beginning of this talk
and create somehow feedback with our nervous system.
This is the revolution that electronic skins are anticipated to bring.
So if you now close your eyes and feel the sensation
that the summer breeze in this early September day
in Forte dei Marmi is causing on your skin,
you could imagine that you could feel this very same sensation
just sitting at your desk in your home
in the city, miles away from the sea.
Electronic skin may enable us to relive, transmit and reimagine experiences,
allowing humanity to better understand
and communicate with the people around us.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
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