JHU Ref #: C16118
Technology Description
· Researchers at Johns Hopkins have developed an e-skin tactile sensor with improved sensitivity to pressure events both in time and space.
· Event-based sensing approach allows for enhanced spatial and temporal resolution of stimuli and efficient data collection.
· Events are transmitted to the detector via wireless communication modalities (e.g., radio frequency identification [RFID], near-field csommunication [NFC]).
· Technology is easily scalable to other devices.
Value Proposition:
· Tactile sensors allow e-skins to better mimic human skin properties (e.g., high-density of mechanoreceptors, high temporal resolution, high flexibility, large area coverage).
· Compact and low-cost design allows for easy integration into portable devices.
· Use of wireless tags allows for simple event-based sensing and seamless data collection.
Unmet Need
· The human skin is a highly complex, flexible organ with a high density of sensory nerves that can rapidly detect and resolve different stimuli occurring over a large surface area in a short period of time.
· Mimicking these skin properties is important for effective e-skin design, allowing robots and prosthetics to respond similarly to external cues.
· Current approaches focus on improving taxel density, but sampling methods used to collect data from taxels are slow, there are inherent trade-off between temporal and spatial resolution, and high density designs are bulky and expensive.
· Therefore, there is a clear need to develop an e-skin sensing mechanism with high spatial and temporal resolution that is also compact, low-cost, and allows for seamless, rapid data collection.
Stage of Development
· Proof of concept work complete.
· Looking for commercialization partners to develop technology for use in prosthetics and robotics.
Publication
A. Slepyan and N. Thakor, "Towards scalable soft e-skin: Flexible event-based tactile-sensors using wireless sensor elements embedded in soft elastomer," 2020 8th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob), New York, NY, USA, 2020, pp. 334-339, doi: 10.1109/BioRob49111.2020.9224353.
