Meet Bionic Skin That Can Feel Tumor
Meet Bionic Skin That Can Feel Tumor
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TOKYO - This one of futuristic idea in health technology. Basic from fact if our skin is our largest organ. A gateway between our brain and the rest of the world.
Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what's going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.
Now, University of Tokyo scientist, Takao Someya is making that scene a reality. Someya has invented a bionic, or electronic, skin (e-skin) with the potential to bestow amazing new powers of sensitivity upon humans.
It is as light as a feather, yet almost indestructible, and could one day change the field of medicine.
The future of healthcare?
Someya is striving for a future where doctors wearing a bespoke glove made from his technology could detect a tiny tumor hiding inside a woman's breast, simply by feeling it. This would reduce the need for referrals and scans and could potentially detect tumors earlier -- during routine checks.
The possibilities are vast.
These wearable e-skins, either tattooed onto our bodies or sewn into our clothes, could also be used to monitor our vital signs and even help medics predict future heart attacks, by monitoring our heart signals. Someya plans to make this happen within the next few years. However, this vision of his began with robots -- not humans.
"I Imagined this futuristic scene where a robot shaking hands with someone could detect their emotion -- like passion, or sorrow. Creating e-skins for robots, he thought, would be a new research trend outside the saturated area of more commercial electronics, which at the time either focused on miniaturization or making machines faster," said Someya.
That was 15 years ago. Today that vision seems far less futuristic when compared to the technology he has since pioneered.
Getting under his skin
"In the early 2000s, when I started out, flexible electronics were getting popular, but most people were trying to develop e-paper," says the professor of electrical engineering. I wanted to do something outside the mainstream," he said.
Artificial skins already existed, but they weren't very good. The ones capable of detecting temperature and pressure were not flexible and were instead only rigid electronic materials that had some level of function. They were also too expensive to be manufactured in large enough quantities to cover a robot.
Someya wanted to tackle all of these limitations, but it wouldn't be easy.
The human touch
Human skin is marvelously complicated -- it is not an easy thing to mimic. When "unwrapped," the average adult contains roughly twenty square feet of skin, with a mind-boggling two million pain receptors. Someya knew that wiring two million sensors into a circuit driver would kill the flexibility of any e-skin.
His desire for flexible skin called for flexible thinking and what Someya did next established him firmly as a visionary in the world of artificial intelligence.
In 2003, he began swapping rigid electronic materials -- such as silicon -- with flexible, organic materials such as dinaphtho thieno thiophene (DNTT), a material often used on the security foil strips found on banknotes.
Firstly, he opted to connect sensors, with the ability to detect pressure and temperatures between 30 degrees C to 80 degrees C (86 degrees F to 176 degrees F), with organic semi-conductors that were naturally soft and biocompatible -- the ideal material for e-skin.
He then laid these materials on the type of "active matrix" grid system traditionally used in LCD displays, enabling each sensor to have an address it could be located at on the grid. This would avoid the need for tangles of wires.
While Someya's peers were placing their sensors on rigid surfaces, such as ultrathin glass and steel foils, his team chose plastic films. Surprisingly rugged and cheap, the plastic would roll around a robot's narrow metal fingers without breaking.
It was the first ultrathin flexible e-skin in the world.
Imagine then a scene where skin could communicate what's going on inside a human body. It could inform surgeons, provide alerts when our body is about to fall ill, or even diagnose diseases inside another human being, simply through the sense of touch.
Now, University of Tokyo scientist, Takao Someya is making that scene a reality. Someya has invented a bionic, or electronic, skin (e-skin) with the potential to bestow amazing new powers of sensitivity upon humans.
It is as light as a feather, yet almost indestructible, and could one day change the field of medicine.
The future of healthcare?
Someya is striving for a future where doctors wearing a bespoke glove made from his technology could detect a tiny tumor hiding inside a woman's breast, simply by feeling it. This would reduce the need for referrals and scans and could potentially detect tumors earlier -- during routine checks.
The possibilities are vast.
These wearable e-skins, either tattooed onto our bodies or sewn into our clothes, could also be used to monitor our vital signs and even help medics predict future heart attacks, by monitoring our heart signals. Someya plans to make this happen within the next few years. However, this vision of his began with robots -- not humans.
"I Imagined this futuristic scene where a robot shaking hands with someone could detect their emotion -- like passion, or sorrow. Creating e-skins for robots, he thought, would be a new research trend outside the saturated area of more commercial electronics, which at the time either focused on miniaturization or making machines faster," said Someya.
That was 15 years ago. Today that vision seems far less futuristic when compared to the technology he has since pioneered.
Getting under his skin
"In the early 2000s, when I started out, flexible electronics were getting popular, but most people were trying to develop e-paper," says the professor of electrical engineering. I wanted to do something outside the mainstream," he said.
Artificial skins already existed, but they weren't very good. The ones capable of detecting temperature and pressure were not flexible and were instead only rigid electronic materials that had some level of function. They were also too expensive to be manufactured in large enough quantities to cover a robot.
Someya wanted to tackle all of these limitations, but it wouldn't be easy.
The human touch
Human skin is marvelously complicated -- it is not an easy thing to mimic. When "unwrapped," the average adult contains roughly twenty square feet of skin, with a mind-boggling two million pain receptors. Someya knew that wiring two million sensors into a circuit driver would kill the flexibility of any e-skin.
His desire for flexible skin called for flexible thinking and what Someya did next established him firmly as a visionary in the world of artificial intelligence.
In 2003, he began swapping rigid electronic materials -- such as silicon -- with flexible, organic materials such as dinaphtho thieno thiophene (DNTT), a material often used on the security foil strips found on banknotes.
Firstly, he opted to connect sensors, with the ability to detect pressure and temperatures between 30 degrees C to 80 degrees C (86 degrees F to 176 degrees F), with organic semi-conductors that were naturally soft and biocompatible -- the ideal material for e-skin.
He then laid these materials on the type of "active matrix" grid system traditionally used in LCD displays, enabling each sensor to have an address it could be located at on the grid. This would avoid the need for tangles of wires.
While Someya's peers were placing their sensors on rigid surfaces, such as ultrathin glass and steel foils, his team chose plastic films. Surprisingly rugged and cheap, the plastic would roll around a robot's narrow metal fingers without breaking.
It was the first ultrathin flexible e-skin in the world.
(rnz)
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