Neuro-encoded electronic skin

Electronic skin (e-skin) is a fast-emerging soft system to provide tactile sensations like our own skin.

However, most of the prototypes today focus on the integration of various sensors on flexible substrates, which can hardly be integrated neurologically onto biological systems nor used over a large area as sensing components for robots: this is mainly because of their mismatch in various aspects including mechanical softness, computing/encoding capability, power consumption.This proposal aims to bring a step-change by developing an e-skin truly rooted in biological systems: the proposed e-Skin will respond to external stimuli (e.g., force) and encode the sensory information in the form of action potentials, just as the biological systems (i.e., sensory neurons) do.

This will be achieved by innovative fabrication of neuron circuit arrays over a large area using nanomaterials, and further interfaced with tactile sensors, all on the soft substrate.Such “bio-like” localised processing, offered by the soft system, greatly decreases the latency of the sensory data, necessary for the upscaling of the sensing pixels to achieve human-level tactile sensation.

Furthermore, this paves the way for the interfacing between soft electronics and biology, triggering transformations in the next generation of neurorobotics, neuroprosthesis and interactive systems.