Synthetic Sensations

Which of these hands – human or robot – can feel the other? The answer is both. The robotic hand is wearing a flexible, electronic skin that can detect pressure and translate it into digital signals, just like nerve impulses. Gentle pressure, like this light handshake, fires the signals at low speed, but a firm grip increases the signal frequency. Detecting pressure digitally, however, was a mere first step for the researchers that developed the skin. Next, they wired it up to actual living brain cells. Using an electronic chip to convert the digital signals into light pulses transmitted by optic fibre, the team stimulated mouse neurons engineered to be light responsive. Sure enough, the brain cells fired in accordance with the light pulse frequency, which depended on the pressure applied to the skin. The hope is that such technology might one day provide a sense of touch to wearers of prostheses.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by the Bao Research Group, Stanford University
• Stanford University, California, USA
• Copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Science, October 2015