A soft e-skin mimics the way human skin can sense things

It was created by a team of researchers from Stanford University, who implanted soft e-skin electrodes in the brains of rats and recorded electrical signals from the animals' motor cortex, the region of the brain responsible for carrying out voluntary movements. The animals twitched their legs in response to different levels of pressure recorded by the brain, depending on the strength of the stimulation frequency, demonstrating that the e-skin was able to detect differing levels of pressure in the same way that animals and humans can do ordinarily. The team says the work could lead to better prosthetics and could help create robots that can feel human-like sensations. The research is published in a paper in Science today. "Our dream is to make a whole hand where we have multiple sensors that can sense pressure, strain, temperature, and vibration," says Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford University, who worked on the project.