3D printing sensors on skin

Rendering of 3D printing of touch sensors directly on skin augmenting fingertips to become a mouse. Credit: Shuang-Zhuang Guo and Michael McAlpine/Advanced Materials

I was speaking few days ago with Matt Bross, chairman and CEO of Compass-EOS and member of the Industry Advisory Board of FDC, and he told me that 3D printing will be changing the world to an extent we are not able to imagine today.

I remembered his words as I read an article presenting the results of a research team at the University of Minnesota that developed a way to 3D print sensors on any surface, including skin.

They demonstrated the possibility of printing working sensors on curved surfaces (they also used a model of a hand to print on fingertips) layering silicon and silver plus insulating materials to create a touch sensor.

They foresee several applications for this process: providing robots with a skin that can sense, thus helping them in manipulating objects and moving around, in prosthetics, like a prosthetic hand, providing sensitivity to pressure and temperature as well as in surgical instrument to provide a much more accurate touch feeling to the surgeon using them. They found out that the sensor is so sensitive that it can measure pulse in real time.

Eventually they might be printed directly on our skin. Imagine, transforming our hand into a mouse…

Take a look at the clip showing the 3d printing at work.

This is also an example of a potential symbioses between an artefact, the sensor, and ourselves, our body.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.