This touch-sensitive glove is made from stretchy optical fibres

A touch-sensitive glove made from stretchable fibre-optic sensors could be used in robotics, sport and medicine. "We made a sensor that can sense haptic interactions, in the same way that our own skin sensors interact with [the] environment," says Hedan Bai at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Bai and her team created the glove using optical fibres made from thin elastomeric polyurethane cables that transmit light from an LED. The light is interrupted when the cables are bent, stretched or put under pressure. The team dyed parts of the fibres with different colours, meaning that as they are distorted, the colour of light coming out of the fibres changes.