The future: wearable technology on your skin

What if a part of your body could become your computer, with a screen on your arm and maybe even a direct link to your brain?

Artificial electronic skin (e-skin) could one day make this a possibility. Researchers are developing flexible, bendable and even stretchable electronic circuits that can be applied directly to the skin. As well as turning your skin into a touchscreen, this could also help replace feeling if you’ve suffered burns or problems with your nervous system.

The problem with organic electronics at the moment is that they aren’t very reliable and give relatively poor electronic performance. Just like real skin, the e-skin developed so far eventually develops wrinkles. These cause its layers to come apart and the circuits to fail.
The other big issue is how to integrate e-skin with the human body so that it doesn’t cause medical problems and so that it can interface with the nervous system.

However, scientists have already had some success linking electronic devices to the nervous system. Researchers at the University of Osaka are leading pioneering research to develop a brain implant from a flexible matrix of organic thin-film transistors that could be activated just by thinking.

In coming years we are are likely to see prototype e-skin devices gaining momentum in the form of wearable bodily sensors, and potentially as a way to harvest energy from the body’s movement. What will take much longer are the more complicated circuits such as those found in smartphones.

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