Fingertip pressure sensor points to dextrous machines

This is the claim of a team in Japan whose pressure sensor measures how fingers interact with objects. It does so with minimal effect on the users' sensitivity and ability to grip objects and could potentially produce useful data for medical and technological applications.  The team’s findings have been published in Science.

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"Our fingertips are extremely sensitive, so sensitive in fact that a superthin plastic foil just a few millionths of a meter thick is enough to affect somebody's sensations," said Sunghoon Lee of the Someya Group at the University of Tokyo. "So a wearable sensor for your fingers has to be extremely thin. But this obviously makes it very fragile and susceptible to damage from rubbing or repeated physical actions. To overcome this, we created a special functional material that is thin and porous called a nanomesh sensor."