Victor is doing some research on artificial skin for a school project, and he found this link, which he sent along to me, writing “Ghost in the Shell: Closer than we think?”.
What we’re trying to do is to interface electronic components with the human body. One of the challenges is that conventional electronics is typically made on very hard and flat surfaces. If you look at our own body we are a 3D object that is moving all around. The challenge is not only electrical but also mechanical because we need to find ways to make electronic things that can conform the body and therefore use materials that are no longer hard and brittle but materials that can be elastic, similar to our own skin, for example.
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This is the second aspect of the project. In my group we’re looking at ways to make these prosthetic skins but there’s also this application where we’re looking at a way to use these very soft electronic devices to interface everything with the nervous system. Because the human body and particularly the nervous system is made of extremely compliant material we cannot use a silicon chip to interface directly with your nerve for a long time. What we’re doing is to use this polymer and elastomer substrate with embedded electrodes in it to connect directly with a peripheral nerve — so a nerve which is in the limb, not in the spinal cord or the brain — really in the limb, from the electrical signal from the neurons. Once we can do that then the idea would be to connect these peripheral implant directly to the prosthetic skin so that we could take the signals that are coming out of the prosthetic skin and convert them into a neuron format and feed that directly into the implant which would then communicate to the nerve and back to the brain.