RE: Epidermal Electronics and Electronic Second Skin

Pretty neat — I'm not sure if you've seen this.

There are a couple of areas where further development is needed...RF communication frequencies change when the circuits are stretched, and dead skin and sweat have to be dealt with during long-term use. These aren't insurmountable complications, though.

Am attaching two related papers. Both from Science today. One describes in more detail the "electronic second skin" and the other about "epidermal electronics."

The authors acknowledge medical applications but they seem most interested in making this into game controllers. :)

Temporary tattoos fitted with electronics make flexible, ultrathin sensors

By Kyle Niemeyer

Modern methods of measuring the body's activity, such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and electromyography (EMG), use electrical signals to measure changes in brain, heart, and muscle activity, respectively. Unfortunately, they rely on bulky and uncomfortable electrodes that are mounted using adhesive tape and conductive gel—or even needles. Because of this, these types of measurements are limited to research and hospital settings and typically used over short periods of time because the contacts can irritate skin.

These limitations may be at an end, however. New research published in Science describes technology that allows electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements. These devices connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and can even be attached via temporary tattoo.

All of the necessary components of the devices, including electrodes, electronic components, sensors, radio frequency communication components, and power supplies, are set within an extremely thin (about 30 µm) elastic polyester sheet. The sheet has a low elastic modulus (that is, it's flexible) and no noticeable mass (about 0.09 g), so you have a lightweight, stretchable membrane.

Circuit elements (such as transistors, diodes, resistors) and sensors are constructed with typical materials like silicon and gallium arsenide, but are linked using nanoribbon and micro/nanomembrane elements to allow extremely small but flexible designs.

The authors refer to their approach as an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), which is basically a fancy way of saying that the device matches the physical properties of the skin (such as stiffness), and its thickness matches that of skin features (wrinkles, creases, etc.). In fact, it adheres to skin only using van der Waals forces—the forces of attraction between atoms and molecules—so no adhesive material is required. Between the flexibility and the lack of adhesive, you wouldn't really notice one of these attached.

I read it and loved the idea......... how is it going with steve

what will happen , vs balmer.?

The image displays the date 2011/8/16. There's a right-pointing arrow.

steve is great.
:-)

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