Stretchable Ultrathin Electronic Skin Produced from a Desktop Printer

Electronic tattoos or e-tattoos are flexible polymer patches that can sense and transmit electrical signals. e-tattoos have great potential in advancing medical prosthetics and human-machine interfacing, but are often expensive to produce.  

A group of researchers from Portugal and the U.S. came up with a whole new method to produce flexible electronic skins. Unlike the conventional approach, which requires costly clean rooms and photolithography, their design is based on an erasable tattoo paper printed with a desktop laser printer. Silver powder coating, liquid metal alloy, and electronic components were added on top of the blueprint sequentially, to give the device excellent conductivity and diverse functions. In their proof-of-concept experiment, the scientists were able to guide the movement of a mechanical arm using the tattoo-like electronic skin.

Source: ACS via Youtube