“Scientists want to develop electronic skin that could imbue prosthetics with the sense of touch.
Chao Wang didn’t always work on artificial skin. When he came to Stanford to work in the electronics lab, his background was in chemistry, specifically in making polymers. One day, he burned his hand in the kitchen, not badly, but enough to take a few days to heal. “After several days my skin came back,” he said, “and I started wondering if we could bring this self-healing back into our electronics.”
Wang now works on developing polymers that could regrow themselves and be used as artificial skin, an idea he says “seemed crazy” when he began. In 2012, he was part of a team that published a paper on self-healing plastic skin in Nature Nanotechnology. The research involved was a big deal not just because it showed that plastic could regrow itself—that work was already relatively well understood. It was a big deal because it combined self-healing properties with a structure that allowed the electrical connections to heal, too. In other words, the skin not only re-healed, it was also able to pass electrical signals from one end to another—so it wasn’t just physically repaired, but it still worked too. Since then, Wang has been steadily improving the artificial skin.
Right now, though, these artificial skins are strictly for use in electronics. Building something that can replace a chunk of skin directly on your arm is a far more difficult proposition, including an almost impossible list of demands: To make artificial skin that could be grafted onto a human body it would have to be thinner, more sensitive, permeable to air and water, stretchable, tearable, repairable, and somehow still have a built-in energy source to power the whole thing. Until electric skin is a reality, patients with large segments of skin tissue missing have a whole slew of other options: If skin can’t be replaced using tissue harvested from elsewhere on the body, for instance, doctors can use donated skin or synthetic skins made of things like nylon mesh, collagen, and silicone.”
The full story is in The Atlantic.