Creating technology that mimics human skin—a flexible, sensitive, and self-healing organ—has remained a significant challenge in material science and robotics. Electronic skin, or e-skin, offers a pathway to giving machines and humans enhanced sensory feedback, but early attempts to develop e-skin systems have encountered persistent roadblocks. These include limitations in sensing complexity, rigidity, and reliance on external power sources.
For robots, prosthetics, or wearable health monitors to operate effectively in dynamic, real-world environments, they need skin-like materials that are not only capable of sensing pressure but also of reacting to sound, motion, and even anticipating touch. Until now, most electronic skin technologies have been unable to replicate these nuanced capabilities.
The pursuit of truly adaptable e-skin has been hampered by these mechanical and sensory limitations, which stem from the fact that most e-skins are built from traditional materials that struggle to mimic the complex properties of biological tissues. Moreover, their reliance on external power sources adds to their bulk, restricting their practical use in applications like wearables or soft robotics.
However, a new generation of e-skin technologies is beginning to break away from these constraints, made possible by advances in mechanical metamaterials – materials engineered with internal structures that give them extraordinary properties – and systems capable of harvesting power from the surrounding environment.
A new study in Advanced Functional Materials ("Metamaterial-Based Electronic Skin with Conformality and Multisensory Integration") pushes this field forward with the development of a metamaterial-based electronic skin that offers both conformability to human tissue and the ability to sense and process multiple forms of sensory data.
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