'Electronic skin’ is recyclable alternative to wearable devices

The team previously described their design for the wearable electronic skin device in 2018, but their latest version claims to have made some promising improvements on the original concept.

Recyclable electronic skin has robotics and biomedical potential

A stretchy circuit board inspired by human skin, the proposed new device is shaped to fit anywhere on the body. According to the team, led by Jianliang Xiao and Wei Zhang, the device can also heal itself much like real skin, and can perform a range of sensory tasks such as measuring the body temperature of users and tracking daily step counts.

“Smart watches are functionally nice, but they’re always a big chunk of metal on a band,” said Zhang, a professor in the university's Department of Chemistry. “If we want a truly wearable device, ideally it will be a thin film that can comfortably fit onto your body.”

Xiao and his colleagues are said to have used screen printing to create a network of liquid metal wires, then ‘sandwiched’ the circuits in between two thin films made out of a ‘highly flexible and self-healing’ material called polyimine. The resulting device, described in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, is ‘a little thicker than a band-aid’, and has been reported to stretch by 60 per cent in any direction without disrupting the electronics inside.