Artificial Skin for Prosthetic Limbs Can Sense a Grain of Salt

(Credit: Bao Research Group, Stanford University) Prosthetic limbs may one day have "skin" with working nerve endings, letting patients feel with their artificial limbs just like they would with a real one. One of the many challenges of adjusting to life with a prosthetic limb is that the new limb lacks sensation; patients can’t feel where their artificial limb is in space, or what it’s touching, so they have to work mostly by sight. Adding a sense of touch could make controlling prosthetic limbs easier and more natural – but that’s a challenge for engineers. The nerve endings in human skin are very sophisticated, low-power circuits that turn physical pressure on the skin into a digital signal in the brain. Those signals in the brain create our sense of touch. It’s difficult to build an electronic version of such a complex system, but Stanford University electrical engineer Benjamin C. K. ...