Stretchable high-tech skin could make prosthetics touch-sensitive

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 16 (UPI) -- Prosthetics technology keeps getting better and better. This year was witness to a half-dozen or so breakthroughs, enabling prosthetics-users to control artificial limbs with their brains. Now, a team of researchers from Korea and the United States say they've developed stretchable synthetic skin that has a sense of touch.

The newly developed polymer, which is still being perfected in the lab, is outfitted with a dense and intricate network of ultra thin gold and silicon sensors. The technology will enable the wearer to transmit touch sensations from prosthetic to the body, and is also outfitted with humidity and temperature sensors to regulate body heat -- so the prosthetic well feel as though it is the same temperature as the rest of the wearer's skin and body.

It's not the first time scientists have unveiled touch-sensitive materials, but the latest iteration is the most sensitive and stretchable yet.

"If you have these sensors at high resolution across the finger, you can give the same tactile touch that the normal hand would convey to the brain," Roozbeh Ghaffari, a researcher with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup MC10, told the MIT Technology Review.

While researchers seem to have conquered the task of creating touch-senstive skin, the challenge of connecting said skin to the wearer's nervous system -- so the user than actually feel the technology in action -- has proved more difficult.

Early lab tests using rats proved inconclusive. "To tell the exact kinds of feeling," said study author Dae-Hyeong Kim, a researcher at Seoul National University, "we need to move onto larger animals, which would be our future work."

The technology is detailed in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.