Researchers at Cornell University have come up with a reliable, skin-tight computing system that’s easy to attach and detach, and can be used for a variety of purposes – from health monitoring to fashion.
On-skin interfaces – sometimes known as “smart tattoos” – have the potential to outperform the sensing capabilities of current wearable technologies but combining comfort and durability has proven challenging.
“We’ve been working on this for years,” said Cindy (Hsin-Liu) Kao, assistant professor of human centered design, and the study’s senior author, “and I think we’ve finally figured out a lot of the technical challenges. We wanted to create a modular approach to smart tattoos, to make them as straightforward as building Legos.”
SkinKit – a plug-and-play system that aims to “lower the floor for entry” to on-skin interfaces for those with little or no technical expertise – is the product of countless hours of development, testing and redevelopment, Kao said.
Fabrication is done with temporary tattoo paper, silicone textile stabilizer and water, creating a multi-layer thin film structure they call “skin cloth.” The layered material can be cut into desired shapes and fitted with electronics hardware to perform a range of tasks.
“The wearer can easily attach them together and also detach them,” said Pin-Sung Ku, lead author of the paper and Hybrid Body Lab member. “Let’s say that today you want to use one of the sensors for certain purposes, but tomorrow you want it for something different. You can easily just detach them and reuse some of the modules to make a new device in minutes.”
The paper “SkinKit: Construction Kit for On-Skin Interface Prototyping” was presented at UbiComp ’22, the Association for Computing Machinery’s international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing.
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