h/t Chase Kyla Hunter:
Breaking: 666 Mark of the Beast Technology Alert, Fresh New Disguises for Tagging and Dehumanizing the World Population
By Beatrice Fantoni
You don’t have to look like a Star Trek Borg to wear skin-mounted electronics.
A team of scientists and engineers at the University of Illinois has developed a “smart skin” that can be used to connect wearers to the cyber-world as easily as sticking on a temporary tattoo.
The smart skin can monitor your heart rate or brain waves, for example, or detect the electric activity in muscle contractions and send the signals to a computer, without stick-on electrodes, bulky wires, conductive gels, tape or skin-penetrating pins.
Just a few centimetres wide and thinner than a human hair, the smart skin could make monitoring people’s physiological status more comfortable and more accurate than using electrodes because it stays stuck to the skin and doesn’t interfere with the wearer’s movement, the researchers say.
“Wires and patches are not the best way to do things,” said John Rogers, a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Illinois, who led the research.
Led by John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, the researchers described their novel skin-mounted electronics in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Science.
The circuit bends, wrinkles, and stretches with the mechanical properties of skin. The researchers demonstrated their concept through a diverse array of electronic components mounted on a thin, rubbery substrate, including sensors, LEDs, transistors, radio frequency capacitors, wireless antennas, and conductive coils and solar cells for power.
“We threw everything in our bag of tricks onto that platform, and then added a few other new ideas on top of those, to show that we could make it work,” said Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering, of chemistry, of mechanical science and engineering, of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering. He also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and with the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the U. of I.
The patches are initially mounted on a thin sheet of water-soluble plastic, then laminated to the skin with water – just like applying a temporary tattoo. Alternately, the electronic components can be applied directly to a temporary tattoo itself, providing concealment for the electronics.
“We think this could be an important conceptual advance in wearable electronics, to achieve something that is almost unnoticeable to the wearer,” said former U. of I. electrical and computer engineering professor Todd Coleman, a CSL researcher who co-led the multi-disciplinary team. “The technology can connect you to the physical world and the cyberworld in a very natural way that feels very comfortable.”
CSI.uiuc.edu Smart skin: Electronics that stick and stretch like a temporary tattoo | Coordinated Science Laboratory
Rogers and his team used tiny, flexible wires comparable to those in silicone circuits, and see-through silicone to make a fine mesh circuit that can stick on with water. It bends, wrinkles and stretches with the skin. It detects what’s happening underneath the surface and sends signals to a computer.
These “wearable electronics” are described in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Science.
Imagine video gaming with just a temporary tattoo and your voice. By wearing the smart skin on your throat, Rogers said, the patch can read the electrical activity of the muscle contractions when you say “up,” “down,” “left,” or “right” and send the command to the game.
The uses for the product in the health field are more compelling. As with a video game, people could use the smart skin to send commands to a prosthetic device, Rogers said. It could help develop new and less cumbersome technology to help people who cannot speak.
Smart skin patches could make it easier to monitor newborn babies or people with sleep disorders because they are gentler than stick-on, point-contact electrodes and you can’t feel them, Rogers said.
There might also be a use for the smart skin in physical rehabilitation, Rogers added. “You can imagine . . . a device that laminates onto a portion of muscle that is atrophied or onto a wound site and can electrically stimulate muscle contraction,” he said.
While it’s still “early days,” Rogers said he and his colleagues are already working to fine-tune the smart skin for clinical use.
At the same time, they are developing the smart skin’s Wi-Fi capabilities so the patches can connect to a monitoring device without the need for ribbon cables.
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