Ongoing work with touch-sensitive artificial skin at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has great promise for gaming, training, and medical rehabilitation. Scientists at the French technology education and research institution recently published their development of soft artificial skin that integrates both sensors and actuators in Soft Robotics.
A team comprising engineers from EPFL’s Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) and the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectric Interfaces (LSBI) developed the artificial skin material. The skin has strain sensors that measure deformation in real time. This data can then be used to drive haptic inputs to the human patient to create a sense of touch.
Potential applications for the EPFL artificial skin include human-computer and human-robot interfaces. For example, in training or rehab applications, the ability to detect surface textures as well as absolute and relative movement could provide feedback to users and reports to therapists and teachers. Patients following a regimen of physical therapy exercises at home could get immediate feedback and therapists could monitor patient progress remotely. Applications in robotics could augment experiences with prosthetics and add a level of differentiation to remote tasks.
The EPFL scientists have tested the artificial skin on users’ fingers, but the next stage involves fully wearable prototypes for rehab and VR/AR studies. The researchers also envision using the skin to stimulate humans in MRI experiments to study dynamic brain activity.
