Nanshu Lu: Smart Skin
“If we can put electronics on humans it can give us a very different channel of communication with the world.”
Wearables and smart devices are becoming the new norm as engineers make electronics smaller and more easily integrated into our lives. But what about electronics becoming a part of our own skin?
“The idea is biointegrated. It is different than wearable,” says Nanshu Lu, an assistant professor in at the Cockrell School of Engineering and one of the minds behind the design of the biointegrated electronic tattoo. “We hope the electronics can become integrated with the body, and eventually we hope some day a part of the body.”
The concept of electronic skin sounds like science fiction, but the reality is much closer than you might think. Lu and her colleagues have created an electronic “tattoo.” These soft electronics are as thin as a temporary tattoo and flexible enough to conform to the movement and texture of the body. The goal of this level of seamlessness is to tap into the physical, electrical and chemical signals emitted by our organs. Being able to communicate with the body on such an intimate scale in real time could revolutionize industries from health care to gaming.
Lu’s research team invented a “cut-and-paste” method for producing electronic tattoos, reducing the production process from weeks to less than an hour.
We talked to Lu about her motivations and predictions about the future of biointegrated electronics.
Why did your research in soft electronics move toward biointegrated materials?
I was always curious about our body. How do we communicate with the rest of the world instead of just having voices? I realized that if we could put electronics on humans it could give us a very different channel of communication with the world.
Are these soft electronics actually part of the skin?
No, it is like a secondary skin on your skin’s surface, or a patch on the heart or the lung. But so soft, thin that it is mechanically imperceptible to the wearer. It’s intimately integrated with the body and eventually, we hope, someday a part of the body.
You mentioned a patch on the heart or lung. How does that work?
When the surgeon is doing open-heart surgery it is very difficult to monitor the heart in three dimensions. We take the soft electronics and make them into a functional sock that goes onto the heart and gives a three-dimensional, full-field mapping of the heart’s functionality. It tells the surgeon immediately about the heart’s electrophysiological signal, mechanical signal, pH, things like that. It is 360 degrees of information.
How much information is gathered from these “smart skin” tattoos?
It’s an enormous amount of data. No one has really ever had that experience of all vital signs continuously monitored on one human body. It is huge data. Once you can simultaneously collect, let’s say, heartbeat, respiration, temperature, hydration — that kind of information — now think how you can use them?
How practical is this high-tech technique?
The manufacturing time and cost have dropped by a hundred fold. Now we can go from idea to device in less than one hour. It’s the first time that tattoo electronics could be made in such a simple, low-cost, bench-top, green manufacturing process.
This is not just for hospitals in big cities, but for people in the third world who don’t have access to a lot of medical care. Now they have a low cost way of monitoring their health. And one day we may be able to get treatment to them with this kind of bioelectronics.
What is needed to take this concept into the mainstream?
We still need batteries, bluetooth, processors, a flexible circuit board — they are still pretty bulky and power consuming. We need collaborators. My close collaborator at UT, Professor Nan Sun, is doing integrated circuit design. He is working very hard to integrate all the components into one single chip that can go onto the patch, wirelessly charge and transmit data.
