Touchy Feely

Rub two fingers together and feel the tiny ridges of your fingertips, their texture, their temperature. Our impeccable sense of touch is a constant source of feedback guiding our experience of the physical world. Without it, interaction becomes much harder – a major limitation on many prosthetic limbs. So efforts to recreate skin’s sensing mechanisms are well underway, and now the first artificial nerve able to sense pressure, and even provoke movement, has been attached to living tissue (pictured on a cockroach). The flat, flexible system consists of sensors linked to a ring oscillator, which converts inputs to electrical impulses, and a transistor modelled on human synapses. The arrangement is able to both prompt reflex twitches in a leg, and detect small tactile details. Although a long way off our skin’s sensational sensitivity, this is a first step towards giving prosthetics, or indeed robots, a way to feel the world.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Yeongin Kim, Alex Chortos and Wentao Xu, amd colleagues
• Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA and Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
• Image reprinted with permission from the AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Published in Science, June 2018