Your Skin Is The Next Hi-Tech Smart Wearable Lets Try It...

Smart wearables have entered the lives of all of us. When they were introduced they made us wonder and gawk at them or people wearing them but now when they are quite common people react to them quite normally. Smart watches have found place in almost everybody’s life but not everybody likes them. Well you know the reason… the space constraint. You feel tied up when you have to see things in such a small space. But you also feel loaded when you have to carry those heavy smartphones in your pocket. Humans never seem to get satisfied with anything.

But imagine, what would happen if your skin became your smartphone? Yes you may laugh at that but the day is not too far when you will be among many people using your skin as your favourite smartphone. Believe it or not, artificial electronic skin (e-skin) could be a real possibility one day. Researchers at this very moment are busy developing flexible, bendable and stretchable electronic circuits that can be applied directly to the skin. This will simply turn your skin into a touchscreen.

Related article : LG introduces a new concept of heavy-duty flexible pressure sensor

The components of a typical e-skin are: flexible transistors, organic LEDs, sensors and organic photovoltaic (solar) cells – connected to each other by stretchable or flexible conductive wires. We actually have e-skin devices now that can detect approaching objects and measure temperature and applied pressure. This technology has also lead to the creation of bendable screens which has prompted one company to turn the human skin into a real smartphone using pico sensors and a pico projector.

As exciting as it may sound, the questions will still linger in the air! Will organic electronics be as reliable as their metallic or plastic or fibre counterparts? Do wrinkles on skin affect the capability of these? Because atoms in organic materials like skin are more chaotically organised than the inorganic materials used to make traditional electronics. This means electrons move 1,000 times slower in organic materials, so devices made from them will operate much more slowly and wouldn’t deal as well with the heat the circuits generate.

The other big issue is the ethical one, who can ensure that the integrating e-skin with the human body will not lead to any medical complications in the long run? What is the guarantee that these devices will not lead to horrible tumours in the body of the person using it? How many of you would actually want to wear your smartphones on your skin and how many of you would feel comfortable doing that for hours in a day? All these questions are sensible and need to be addressed with responsibility. As long as these questions remain unanswered or are left ignored, there is no point in supporting technology like e-skin. Human body is too great a cost to pay for a little comfort.

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