Could skin make us… skinny?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Today, everyone has fitness trackers and smart watches. You can check the status of your body whenever. But what if you forget to charge them? Is there an even easier way to monitor your health?
Enter Yeongin Kim and team from MIT.
They designed electronic “E-Skins” for health monitoring. They’re made of a stretchable semi-conductor and a sticky porous patch. No batteries needed.
It vibrates in response to electrical signals from your body. Then it wirelessly communicates to nearby receivers like phones. This allowed test subjects to monitor biometrics like pulse and sweat composition in real time, for a whole week!
The inventors anticipate E-Skins will be a comfortable and convenient method for health monitoring.
And that’s the skinny on E-Skins! *Shudder*
Reference: Kim, Y., Suh, J. M., Shin, J., Liu, Y., Yeon, H., Qiao, K., Kum, H. S., Kim, C., Lee, H. E., Choi, C., Kim, H., Lee, D., Lee, J., Kang, J.-H., Park, B.-I., Kang, S., Kim, J., Kim, S., Perozek, J. A., … Kim, J. (2022). Chip-less wireless electronic skins by remote epitaxial freestanding compound semiconductors. Science, 377(6608), 859–864. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7325