Jellyfish inspire creation of water-resistant electronic skin

The electronic skin is transparent, stretchable, touch-sensitive, self-healing in aquatic environments and could be used in everything from water-resistant touchscreens to aquatic soft robots, claim the team from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Assistant Professor Benjamin Tee and his team from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the NUS Faculty of Engineering developed the material, along with collaborators from Tsinghua University and the University of California Riverside.

The researchers spent just over a year developing the material, and its invention was first reported in Nature Electronics in February 2019.

Asst Prof Tee has been working on electronic skins for many years and was part of the team that developed the first ever self-healing electronic skin sensors in 2012.

“One of the challenges with many self-healing materials today is that they are not transparent and they do not work efficiently when wet,” he said. “These drawbacks make them less useful for electronic applications such as touchscreens which often need to be used in wet weather conditions. So, we wondered how we could make an artificial material that could mimic the water-resistant nature of jellyfishes and yet also be touch sensitive.”