Breakthrough: New electronic skin can respond to pain

Electronic skin pain

Prostheses have developed rapidly in recent years, and researchers have now achieved a breakthrough in the development of an artificial skin replacement. They have developed an electronic skin that can transmit touch and pain.

A feeling that human skin offers

The skin is man’s largest sensory organ and, in a complex interplay of nerves, provides lightning-fast impressions such as surface texture and pressure strength - or, in an emergency, pain impressions. While in the past there have always been attempts to artificially replicate parts of this system, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, want to have achieved a breakthrough here: Electronic skin, which can realistically and in real time transmit pain.

Electric skin of RMIT in Melbourne
Concept for artificial receptors (RMIT)

"We feel things through the skin all the time, but our pain response only starts at a certain point, for example when we touch something too hot or too sharp," says the study leader Professor Madhu Bhaskaran." No electronic technology has been able to realistically imitate this very human feeling of pain - until today. Our artificial skin reacts immediately when pressure, heat or cold reach a pain threshold." Bhaskaran and his team see their development as a decisive step towards "advanced feedback systems", which are indispensable for truly intelligent prosthetics and intelligent robotics.

Three systems combined

According to the publication in the specialist journal Advanced Intelligent Systems, the team combines three previous inventions for their system, each of which has been filed for patent applications.

• Elastic electronics: the combination of oxide materials with biocompatible silicon results in transparent, unbreakable and portable electronics that are as thin as a sticker.
• Temperature-reactive coatings: coatings 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, which change in response to heat.
• Brain-mimicking memory: electronic memory cells that mimic the way the brain uses long-term memory to retrieve and store previous information.

The result: "Our artificial skin knows the difference between gently touching a pin with your finger or accidentally stabbing it - a crucial difference that has never been achieved electronically before," says Bhaskaran