A Japanese research team created an artificial skin that could help improve the quality of life. (Image via University of Tokyo)
From a pacemaker for the brain that helps patients with memory to an artificial limb that teach the patient how to command voluntary movements, medicine keeps copying engineering to improve lives. Or, maybe it is engineering that is evolving to provides better tools for the medical practitioners. This time it is the electronic chip that is crossing from electronics to healthcare. Mounted on a piece of artificial skin, the chips could become instrumental in monitoring the health of long-distance patients with a heart condition.
Two Japanese entities are responsible for this new technology: The Graduate school of engineering of the University of Tokyo and the Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) corporation. The DNP is a company created in 1876 that specializes in information communication, lifestyle and industrial supplies, and electronics. To put it simply, those two found a way to read the heart’s activity through a screen that adheres to the skin of the patient. The screen can be considered another skin on the patient because of its unique ability to move with the skin it is attached to. What makes the screen expand with the skin of the patient is its wire system which represents a little less than half of the display surface. The display uses a mass microLEDs measuring 16inches by 24inches. All of it laid on a stretchy surface.
The skin from its package. (Image via University of Tokyo)
In addition to mimicking the skin of the person, this flexible display is embedded with a feature that let it measure in real time the oscillations of the cardiac activity which it displays or conveys remotely to anyone who might need that information. All the information the artificial skin measures can be stored in the cloud and reviewed in the future.
The advantage of the electronic skin is to allow doctors to closely monitor their patients, especially when the latter are at home with their family. The dive is currently constructed for older generation patients who might not be comfortable with devices that are hard to manipulate or simply too invasive. Furthermore, the electronic skin promises to give peace of mind to parents and doctors of older patients who are in a nursing home.
According to the research team, they achieve the amazing design of the electronic skin by following the same processes as they would when making any electronic device. But, Takao Someya, the head researcher of the University insists that their skin display uses “simple graphics with motion.” He also wants to point out that the device his team and he came up with is different from other similar devices in the fact that it is flexible when others are rigid. Patients can also wear the electronic skin for up to 7 days at a time. The Japanese team is so proud of the result of their research that they precise that no pixel misses when the device is bent by the patient’s movements.
With the help of DNP, the researchers hope to bring the artificial skin to the public by 2021 after they have reduced the costs of production and perfected the structure of the “skin.”
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