Dumbbell-Shaped Holes Make Electronic Skin More Breathable

New e-skin can withstand profuse sweating, resulting in more accurate readings of biomedical measurements. View in browser

Image credits: Felice Frankel/MIT Dumbbell-Shaped Holes Make Electronic Skin More Breathable New e-skin can withstand profuse sweating, resulting in more accurate readings of biomedical measurements. Karen Kwon, Contributor July 16, 2021                                                                                                                                       (Inside Science) -- The quest to track health information without drawing blood has inspired wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch, but it's also pushing engineers to develop thin sensors that adhere to the skin like a bandage. Some of these devices can struggle to stay sticky, especially when faced with profuse sweating, but a group of engineers recently developed a new type of electronic skin, or e-skin, that can track vital signs and other information even during intense exercise. Today's most popular wearables are great for everyday consumers' casual use. But they are thick and rigid, and, therefore, they cannot conform to the curvature of the skin. This has led to less accurate measurement of the vitals, said Hanwool Yeon, a materials engineer at MIT and one of the lead authors of the paper published in Science Advances in June. With its thinness and clinginess, e-skin can close that gap and improve the quality of the measurements of heart rate, body temperature and more. Read more Copyright 2021 American Institute of Physics. Inside Science syndicates its articles, columns, blogs and videos to news organizations. To initiate syndication, or request permission to republish our content (on a one-time or continuing basis), please contact Inside Science at insidescience@aip.org. News organizations seeking permission to republish Inside Science content must fully credit Inside Science as the original source of the content, include the author byline, and republish the original, unaltered form (excluding content titles, headlines, or sub-headlines). The reprint format can be seen here. Copyright conditions and usage terms are subject to change at any time without consent or any type of prior notice. To unsubscribe from all future mailings from Inside Science please click here. To manage your email subscriptions please click here.

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