Star Wars idea behind creation of artificial skin

SINGAPORE: Researchers here have developed “electronic skin” capable of recreating a sense of touch, an innovation they hope will allow people with prosthetic limbs to detect objects, as well as feel texture or even temperature and pain.

The device, dubbed ACES or Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin, is made up of 100 small sensors and is about 1 sq cm in size.

The researchers at the National University of Singapore said it can process information faster than the human nervous system, is able to recognise 20 to 30 different textures and can read Braille letters with more than 90% accuracy.

“Humans need to slide to feel texture but in this case the skin, with just a single touch, is able to detect textures of different roughness,” said research team leader Benjamin Tee, adding that Artificial Intelligence algorithms let the device learn quickly. A demonstration showed the device could detect that a squishy stress ball was soft and determine that a solid plastic ball was hard.

“When you lose your sense of touch, you essentially become numb... and prosthetic users face that problem,”Tee said.

“By recreating an artificial version of the skin for their prosthetic devices, they can hold a hand and feel the warmth and softness, and how hard they are holding the hand.”

Tee said the concept was inspired by a scene from the Star Wars movie in which the character Luke Skywalker loses his right hand and it is replaced by a robotic one. – Reuters