Moving skin beyond the biological.
Moving skin beyond the biological.
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DOI：
10.1038/d41586-018-07434-6
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发表时间：
2018-11-01
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Bourzac, Katherine
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Bourzac, Katherine
“我们将皮肤视为一个可穿戴电子系统，”鲍说。“它拥有你想要模仿的所有组件，以制造更好的假肢、可穿戴传感器和更智能的机器人。”与坚硬且易碎的传统电子产品不同，皮肤具有弹性。它具有弹性和自我修复能力。皮肤包含一个卓越的集成节能传感器网络，可以接收压力、温度等信息。因此，对于像包这样的研究人员来说，建议使用类似皮肤的电子设备来赋予假肢触觉感，这似乎是一个自然的飞跃。过去 15 年化学和材料科学的一系列进步使研究人员能够接近模仿皮肤的许多特性——自我修复能力、弹性和传感能力。现在，科学家们需要找到方法将这些进步整合到一个设计中。他们必须证明，这种类皮肤设备不仅可以进行单一时间点的医学测量，还可以使人造皮肤本身足够坚固，可以长时间佩戴。不仅仅是人类皮肤提供了灵感，研究人员一直在尝试模仿章鱼等生物如何改变其外观（参见“水下灵感”）。新皮肤人类皮肤是一个敏感、复杂且强健的器官。它具有防水功能，切割后可自行愈合。它的众多机械感受器可以检测振动、压力和纹理等感觉——它们足够敏感，可以检测微风或飞落的苍蝇的微弱压力。皮肤传感器与周围神经系统的紧密耦合负责我们的反射，使我们能够在没有意识的情况下拾取不同重量、形状和纹理的物体。这些特性可能看起来不起眼，但对于拥有惰性假手的人或试图制造弹性、低功耗设备的电气工程师来说，人类皮肤是一个奇迹。
“We view the skin as a wearable electronic system,” Bao says.“It has all the components you want to mimic to make better prostheses, wearable sensors and smarter robots.” Unlike conventional electronics, which are rigid and brittle, skin is resilient. It’s stretchy and self-healing. And skin contains a remarkable, integrated network of energy-efficient sensors that pick up pressure, temperature and more. It seems almost a natural leap, then, for researchers such as Bao to suggest using skin-like electronics to give prosthetics a sense of touch. A slew of chemistry and materials-science advances over the past 15 years have enabled researchers to come close to mimicking many of skin’s properties—its ability to self-heal, its stretchiness and its sensing capabilities. Now, scientists need to find ways to pull those advances together in a single design. And they must show that such skin-like devices can do more than single time-point medical measurements, as well as making the artificial skin itself robust enough to wear over long periods of time. And it is not just human skin providing inspiration, researchers have been trying to mimic how creatures such as octopuses change their appearance (see ‘Underwater inspiration’).NEW SKINS Human skin is a sensitive, sophisticated and robust organ. It is waterresistant and heals when cut. Its multitude of mechanoreceptors detect sensations such as vibration, pressure and texture—they’re sensitive enough to detect the faint pressure of a breeze or alighting flies. The tight coupling of skin sensors with the peripheral nervous system is responsible for our reflexes and allows us to pick up objects of different weights, shapes and textures without conscious thought. Such properties might seem unremarkable, but for a person with an inert prosthetic hand or an electrical engineer trying to make resilient, low-power devices, human skin is a wonder.