標題: New e-skin can better withstand sweat thanks to Japanese paper-cutting technique [打印本頁] 作者: miniming 時間: 2021-7-19 12:42 標題: New e-skin can better withstand sweat thanks to Japanese paper-cutting technique
New e-skin can better withstand sweat thanks to Japanese paper-cutting technique
Dumbbell-shaped holes in the material may be the key.
The quest to track health information without drawing blood has inspired wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch, but it's also pushing engineers to develop thin sensors that adhere to the skin like a bandage. Some of these devices can struggle to stay sticky, especially when faced with profuse sweating, but a group of engineers recently developed a new type of electronic skin, or e-skin, that can track vital signs and other information even during intense exercise. pg slot
Today's most popular wearables are great for everyday consumers' casual use. But they are thick and rigid, and, therefore, they cannot conform to the curvature of the skin. This has led to less accurate measurement of the vitals, said Hanwool Yeon, a materials engineer at MIT and one of the lead authors of the paper published in the journal Science Advances in June. With its thinness and clinginess, e-skin can close that gap and improve the quality of the measurements of heart rate, body temperature and more.
But even the high-tech e-skins have a downside: Many of them aren't sweat proof. A person wearing the e-skin might be able to get away with light sweating, as the sweat would vaporize quickly, but the readings from the sensors would start to become imprecise if the person starts sweating profusely. Even worse, the e-skin might detach from the skin or cause irritation.
To allow the sweat to pass through, Yeon and his co-workers turned to one of the oldest tricks in the book: kirigami, a Japanese paper-cutting technique. First, the team punched holes on the e-skin to match the size of sweat pores and the distance between them. Then, inspired by kirigami, the team cut away even more material between two holes in an alternating pattern. The resulting pattern looks like a crisscross of dumbbells, which, when tested, could tolerate bending and stretching more than the conventional e-skin with simple holes.作者: martina28043 時間: 2021-7-20 20:17
