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    A surprising opportunity for telehealth in shaping the future of medicine

    Expanded telehealth services at UT Southwestern have proved effective at safely delivering patient care during the pandemic, leading to an increase in patients even in specialties such as plastic surgery, according to a new study.
    The study, published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, illuminates the unexpected benefits that telehealth has had during the pandemic and provides insight into what this may mean for the future of medicine in the United States.
    “Prior to COVID-19, it was not clear if telehealth would meet the standard of care in highly specialized clinical practices. Out of necessity, we were forced to innovate quickly. What we found is that it is actually a really good fit,” says Alan Kramer, M.P.H., assistant vice president of health system emerging strategies at UTSW and co-author of the study.
    UT Southwestern was already equipped with telehealth technology when COVID-19 hit — but only as a small pilot program. Through incredible team efforts, telehealth was expanded across the institution within days, bringing with it several unanticipated benefits for both the medical center and patients.
    “The conversion rate to telehealth is higher than in person,” says Bardia Amirlak, M.D., FACS, associate professor of plastic surgery and the study’s senior corresponding author. The study found 25,197 of 34,706 telehealth appointments across the institution were completed in April 2020 — a 72.6 percent completion rate — compared with a 65.8 percent completion rate of in-person visits from April 2019.
    The study notes the significant increases in the volume of new patients seen by telehealth beginning in March 2020. This resulted from a combination of relaxed regulations and an increasing comfort level with telehealth visits among physicians and patients. UTSW saw the percentage of new patients seen through telehealth visits increase from 0.77 percent in February to 14.2 percent and 16.7 percent in March and April, respectively.

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    Even within a niche field like plastic surgery, the implementation of telehealth has been incredibly successful, demonstrating the tractability of telehealth to a wide range of practices. From April to mid-May, plastic surgery completed 340 telehealth visits in areas such as breast cancer reconstruction, hand surgery, and wound care, with completion rates similar to the whole of UTSW. Likewise, plastic surgery also saw a large number of new patients, who comprised 41 percent of the telehealth visits.
    “The fear was that the platform wouldn’t be able to handle it: the privacy issues, insurance issues, malpractice issues … but it came together well and we were able to ramp up into the thousands, and were able to not only decrease patient anxiety, but also increase many beneficial factors, such as patient access,” says Amirlak.
    The study reported several boons for telehealth patients, including reductions in stress, missed work, the number of hospital visits, travel time, and exposure to pathogens, in addition to improving access to care with the option for out-of-state consultations. Indeed, patients from 43 states and Puerto Rico have participated in telehealth visits at UTSW facilities since March.
    Even as COVID-19 restrictions have eased in Texas, telehealth is still proving to be a major part of UT Southwestern’s clinical practice. “The feedback from patients has been very positive,” says Kramer. “We’re now sustaining 25 percent of our practice being done virtually, a major win for our patients. It’s changed the way we think about care.”
    Whether this trend continues into the post-COVID-19 world remains to be seen, he says. But either way, Kramer says, it is clear that telehealth will be a useful tool.
    The numerous benefits that telehealth has to offer are accompanied by several challenges, however, such as the practicality and risks of remote diagnostic medicine. Though technology is starting to address some issues with the development of tools such as electronic stethoscopes and consumer-facing apps that can measure blood oxygen levels and perform electrocardiograms, for example, some argue the value of the in-person physical exam cannot be replaced. Moving forward, Amirlak says, “it will be our responsibility as physicians and scientists to recognize the potential dangers of taking telehealth to the extreme right now and missing a clinical diagnosis.”
    Aside from patient-facing issues, other challenges need to be included in discussions of the future of telehealth, including federal, state, and local laws; privacy concerns; and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. Many statutes and restrictions have been loosened during the pandemic, allowing institutions like UTSW to implement telehealth rapidly and effectively. But the future of telehealth will necessitate the development of long-term regulations.
    “Based on the trends, it seems that telehealth is here to stay. So it’s important to think about the concerns, and based on this information, the issues that we have and how we can resolve them going forward,” says Christine Wamsley, a UTSW research fellow and first author of the study. With the ramp-up of telehealth and related restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, now may be the best opportunity for health care providers and governmental agencies to address these challenges and set out guidelines for the practice of telehealth. More

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    Miniature antenna enables robotic teaming in complex environments

    A new, miniature, low-frequency antenna with enhanced bandwidth will enable robust networking among compact, mobile robots in complex environments.
    In a collaborative effort between the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory and the University of Michigan, researchers developed a novel design approach that improves upon limitations of conventional antennas operating at low frequencies — demonstrating smaller antennas that maintain performance.
    Impedance matching is a key aspect of antenna design, ensuring that the radio transmits power through the antenna with minimal reflections while in transmit mode — and that when the antenna is in receive mode, it captures power to efficiently couple to the radio over all frequencies within the operational bandwidth.
    “Conventional impedance matching techniques with passive components — such as resistors, inductors and capacitors — have a fundamental limit, known as the Chu-Wheeler limit, which defines a bound for the maximum achievable bandwidth-efficiency product for a given antenna size,” said Army researcher Dr. Fikadu Dagefu. “In general, low-frequency antennas are physically large, or their miniaturized counterparts have very limited bandwidth and efficiency, resulting in higher power requirement.”
    With those challenges in mind, the researchers developed a novel approach that improves bandwidth and efficiency without increasing size or changing the topology of the antenna.
    “The proposed impedance matching approach applies a modular active circuit to a highly miniaturized, efficient, lightweight antenna — overcoming the aforementioned Chu-Wheeler performance limit,” said Army postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jihun Choi. “This miniature, actively matched antenna enables the integration of power-efficient, low-frequency radio systems on compact mobile agents such as unmanned ground and aerial vehicles.”
    The researchers said this approach could create new opportunities for networking in the Army.

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    The ability to integrate low-frequency radio systems with low size, weight, and power — or SWAP — opens the door for the exploitation of this underutilized and underexplored frequency band as part of the heterogeneous autonomous networking paradigm. In this paradigm, agents equipped with complementary communications modalities must adapt their approaches based on challenges in the environment for that specific mission. Specifically, the lower frequencies are suitable for reliable communications in complex propagation environments and terrain due to their improved penetration and reduced multipath.
    “We integrated the developed antenna on small, unmanned ground vehicles and demonstrated reliable, real-time digital video streaming between UGVs, which has not been done before with such compact low-frequency radio systems,” Dagefu said. “By exploiting this technology, the robotic agents could coordinate and form teams, enabling unique capabilities such as distributed on-demand beamforming for directional and secure battlefield networking.”
    With more than 80 percent of the world’s population expected to live in dense urban environments by 2050, innovative Army networking capabilities are necessary to create and maintain transformational overmatch, the researchers said. Lack of fixed infrastructure coupled with the increasing need for a competitive advantage over near-peer adversaries imposes further challenges on Army networks, a top modernization priority for multi-domain operations.
    While previous experimental studies demonstrated bandwidth enhancement with active matching applied to a small non-resonant antenna (e.g., a short metallic wire), no previous work simultaneously ensures bandwidth and radiation efficiency enhancement compared to small, resonant antennas with performance near the Chu-Wheeler limit.
    The Army-led active matching design approach addresses these key challenges stemming from the trade-off among bandwidth, efficiency and stability. The researchers built a 15-centimeter prototype (2 percent of the operating wavelength) and demonstrated that the new design achieves more than threefold bandwidth enhancement compared to the same antenna without applying active matching, while also improving the transmission efficiency 10 times compared to the state-of-the-art actively matched antennas with the same size.
    “In the design, a highly accurate model captures sharp impedance variation of the highly miniaturized resonant antenna” Choi said. “Based on the model, we develop an active matching circuit that enhances bandwidth and efficiency simultaneously while ensuring the circuit is fully stable.”
    The team published their research, A Miniature Actively Matched Antenna for Power-Efficient and Bandwidth-Enhanced Operation at Low VHF, authored by Drs. Jihun Choi, Fikadu Dagefu, Brian Sadler, and Prof. Kamal Sarabandi, in the peer-reviewed journal Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.
    “This technology is ripe for future development and transition to our various partners within the Army,” Dagefu said. “We are optimistic that with the integration of aspects of our heterogeneous networking research, this technology will further develop and will be integrated into future Army communications systems.” More

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    A multinational study overturns a 130-year old assumption about seawater chemistry

    There’s more to seawater than salt. Ocean chemistry is a complex mixture of particles, ions and nutrients. And for over a century, scientists believed that certain ion ratios held relatively constant over space and time.
    But now, following a decade of research, a multinational study has refuted this assumption. Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, professor and vice chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, and her colleagues discovered that the seawater ratios of three key elements vary across the ocean, which means scientists will have to re-examine many of their hypotheses and models. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
    Calcium, magnesium and strontium (Ca, Mg and Sr) are important elements in ocean chemistry, involved in a number of biologic and geologic processes. For instance, a host of different animals and microbes use calcium to build their skeletons and shells. These elements enter the ocean via rivers and tectonic features, such as hydrothermal vents. They’re taken up by organisms like coral and plankton, as well as by ocean sediment.
    The first approximation of modern seawater composition took place over 130 years ago. The scientists who conducted the study concluded that, despite minor variations from place to place, the ratios between the major ions in the waters of the open ocean are nearly constant.
    Researchers have generally accepted this idea from then on, and it made a lot of sense. Based on the slow turnover of these elements in the ocean — on the order of millions of years — scientists long thought the ratios of these ions would remain relatively stable over extended periods of time.
    “The main message of this paper is that we have to revisit these ratios,” said Iglesias-Rodriguez. “We cannot just continue to make the assumptions we have made in the past essentially based on the residency time of these elements.”
    Back in 2010, Iglesias-Rodriguez was participating in a research expedition over the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, a region of North Atlantic seafloor west of Europe. She had invited a former student of hers, this paper’s lead author Mario Lebrato, who was pursuing his doctorate at the time.

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    Their study analyzed the chemical composition of water at various depths. Lebrato found that the Ca, Mg and Sr ratios from their samples deviated significantly from what they had expected. The finding was intriguing, but the data was from only one location.
    Over the next nine years, Lebrato put together a global survey of these element ratios. Scientists including Iglesias-Rodriguez collected over 1,100 water samples on 79 cruises ranging from the ocean’s surface to 6,000 meters down. The data came from 14 ecosystems across 10 countries. And to maintain consistency, all the samples were processed by a single person in one lab.
    The project’s results overturned the field’s 130-year old assumption about seawater chemistry, revealing that the ratio of these ions varies considerably across the ocean.
    Scientists have long used these ratios to reconstruct past ocean conditions, like temperature. “The main implication is that the paleo-reconstructions we have been conducting have to be revisited,” Iglesias-Rodriguez explained, “because environmental conditions have a substantial impact on these ratios, which have been overlooked.”
    Oceanographers can no longer assume that data they have on past ocean chemistry represent the whole ocean. It has become clear they can extrapolate only regional conditions from this information.
    This revelation also has implications for modern marine science. Seawater ratios of Mg to Ca affect the composition of animal shells. For example, a higher magnesium content tends to make shells more vulnerable to dissolution, which is an ongoing issue as increasing carbon dioxide levels gradually make the ocean more acidic. “Biologically speaking, it is important to figure out these ratios with some degree of certainty,” said Iglesias-Rodriguez.
    Iglesias-Rodriguez’s latest project focuses on the application of rock dissolution as a method to fight ocean acidification. She’s looking at lowering the acidity of seawater using pulverized stones like olivine and carbonate rock. This intervention will likely change the balance of ions in the water, which is something worth considering. As climate change continues unabated, this intervention could help keep acidity in check in small areas, like coral reefs. More

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    An embedded ethics approach for AI development

    The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects. An interdisciplinary team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) advocates the integration of ethics from the very beginning of the development process of new technologies. Alena Buyx, Professor of Ethics in Medicine and Health Technologies, explains the embedded ethics approach.
    Professor Buyx, the discussions surrounding a greater emphasis on ethics in AI research have greatly intensified in recent years, to the point where one might speak of “ethics hype” …
    Prof. Buyx: … and many committees in Germany and around the world such as the German Ethics Council or the EU Commission High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence have responded. They are all in agreement: We need more ethics in the development of AI-based health technologies. But how do things look in practice for engineers and designers? Concrete solutions are still few and far between. In a joint pilot project with two Integrative Research Centers at TUM, the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM) with its director, Prof. Sami Haddadin, and the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), with Prof. Ruth Müller, we want to try out the embedded ethics approach. We published the proposal in Nature Machine Intelligence at the end of July.
    What exactly is meant by the “embedded ethics approach”?
    Prof.Buyx: The idea is to make ethics an integral part of the research process by integrating ethicists into the AI development team from day one. For example, they attend team meetings on a regular basis and create a sort of “ethical awareness” for certain issues. They also raise and analyze specific ethical and social issues.
    Is there an example of this concept in practice?
    Prof. Buyx: The Geriatronics Research Center, a flagship project of the MSRM in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, is developing robot assistants to enable people to live independently in old age. The center’s initiatives will include the construction of model apartments designed to try out residential concepts where seniors share their living space with robots. At a joint meeting with the participating engineers, it was noted that the idea of using an open concept layout everywhere in the units — with few doors or individual rooms — would give the robots considerable range of motion. With the seniors, however, this living concept could prove upsetting because they are used to having private spaces. At the outset, the engineers had not given explicit consideration to this aspect.
    Prof.Buyx: The approach sounds promising. But how can we avoid “embedded ethics” from turning into an “ethics washing” exercise, offering companies a comforting sense of “being on the safe side” when developing new AI technologies?
    That’s not something we can be certain of avoiding. The key is mutual openness and a willingness to listen, with the goal of finding a common language — and subsequently being prepared to effectively implement the ethical aspects. At TUM we are ideally positioned to achieve this. Prof. Sami Haddadin, the director of the MSRM, is also a member of the EU High-Level Group of Artificial Intelligence. In his research, he is guided by the concept of human centered engineering. Consequently, he has supported the idea of embedded ethics from the very beginning. But one thing is certain: Embedded ethics alone will not suddenly make AI “turn ethical.” Ultimately, that will require laws, codes of conduct and possibly state incentives.

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    Managing data flow boosts cyber-physical system performance

    Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a suite of algorithms to improve the performance of cyber-physical systems — from autonomous vehicles to smart power grids — by balancing each component’s need for data with how fast that data can be sent and received.
    “Cyber-physical systems integrate sensors, devices, and communications tools, allowing all of the elements of a system to share information and coordinate their activities in order to accomplish goals,” says Aranya Chakrabortty, co-author of a paper on the new algorithms and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. “These systems have tremendous potential — the National Science Foundation refers to them as ‘enabling a smart and connected world’ — but these systems also pose challenges.
    “Specifically, the physical agents in a system — the devices — need a lot of communication links in order to function effectively. This leads to large volumes of data flowing through the communication network, which causes routing and queuing delays. These delays can cause long waiting times for the agents to take action, thereby degrading the quality of the system. In other words, there’s so much data, being passed through so many links, that a system may not be able to accomplish its established goals — the lag time is just too long.”
    This creates a dilemma. Reducing communication can hurt the quality of the system’s performance, because each element of the system will be operating with less information. On the other hand, reducing communication means that each element of the system would be able to get that information more quickly.
    “So, it’s all a trade-off,” Chakrabortty says. “The right balance needs to be struck between all three variables — namely, the right amount of communication sparsity, the optimal delay, and the best achievable performance of the agents. Striking this fine balance to carry out the mission in the best possible way while also ensuring safe and stable operation of every agent is not easy. This is where our algorithms come in.”
    Chakrabortty and graduate student Nandini Negi developed three algorithms that, taken together, reduce the overall number of data requests from each node in a system, but ensure that each node receives enough information, quickly enough, to achieve system goals.
    “There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will apply to every cyber-physical system,” Negi says. “But our algorithms allow users to identify the optimal communications solution for any system.”

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    A small number of self-organizing autonomous vehicles significantly increases traffic flow

    With the addition of just a small number of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road, traffic flow can become faster, greener, and safer in the near future, a new study suggests.
    The study, published in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, focused on the anticipated hybrid traffic flow of the future, which will combine traditional, human-operated vehicles with a small fraction of AVs. This scenario raises several questions as to whether traffic flow would actually improve and, if so, how many AVs would be required to produce significant change.
    It may seem that a large number of AVs is required for a significant impact on traffic flow, especially on multilane freeways, as human drivers can simply ignore and bypass AVs. But this isn’t necessarily so. In their research, Dr. Amir Goldental and Prof. Ido Kanter, from the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University, present a simple set of guidelines and regulations for achieving the self-organization of AVs into constellations that dynamically control the entire traffic flow.
    The researchers suggest guidelines for efficient regulations, such that AVs can cooperate and significantly enhance traffic flow even when fewer than 5% of the vehicles on the road are autonomous, as seen in the accompanying video and image. In their article, the researchers describe how AVs should behave on a freeway in order to self-organize into groups that split the traffic flow into controllable clusters. It was observed that it takes less than two minutes to achieve self-organized high-speed, greener and safer traffic flow when starting from congested traffic.
    “Without regulations on AVs, we face a classic example of game theory paradox, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, where each vehicle tries to optimize its driving speed but the overall traffic flow is not optimal. In our research we examine how, with proper regulations, a very small number of AVs can improve the overall traffic flow significantly, through cooperation,” says Dr. Goldental.
    Quantitatively, the authors report a substantial increase of up to 40% in traffic flow speed with up to a 28% decrease in fuel consumption. Also, traffic safety is enhanced as traffic becomes more ordered and fewer lane transitions occur. The study shows that these improvements can be achieved without a central agent that governs AVs and without communication between AVs using current infrastructure.

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    Memory in a metal, enabled by quantum geometry

    The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques is changing the world dramatically with novel applications such as internet of things, autonomous vehicles, real-time imaging processing and big data analytics in healthcare. In 2020, the global data volume is estimated to reach 44 Zettabytes, and it will continue to grow beyond the current capacity of computing and storage devices. At the same time, the related electricity consumption will increase 15 times by 2030, swallowing 8% of the global energy demand. Therefore, reducing energy consumption and increasing speed of information storage technology is in urgent need.
    Berkeley researchers led by HKU President Professor Xiang Zhang when he was in Berkeley, in collaboration with Professor Aaron Lindenberg’s team at Stanford University, invented a new data storage method: They make odd numbered layers slide relative to even-number layers in tungsten ditelluride, which is only 3nm thick. The arrangement of these atomic layers represents 0 and 1 for data storage. These researchers creatively make use of quantum geometry: Berry curvature, to read information out. Therefore, this material platform works ideally for memory, with independent ‘write’ and ‘read’ operation. The energy consumption using this novel data storage method can be over 100 times less than the traditional method.
    This work is a conceptual innovation for non-volatile storage types and can potentially bring technological revolution. For the first time, the researchers prove that two-dimensional semi-metals, going beyond traditional silicon material, can be used for information storage and reading. This work was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Physics [ref 1]. Compared with the existing non-volatile (NVW) memory, this new material platform is expected to increase storage speed by two orders and decrease energy cost by three orders, and it can greatly facilitate the realization of emerging in-memory computing and neural network computing.
    This research was inspired by the research of Professor Zhang ‘s team on “Structural phase transition of single-layer MoTe2 driven by electrostatic doping” , published in Nature in 2017 ; and Lindenberg Lab’s research on “Use of light to control the switch of material properties in topological materials,” published in Nature in 2019.
    Previously, researchers found that in the two-dimensional material-tungsten ditelluride, when the material is in a topological state, the special arrangement of atoms in these layers can produce so-called “Weyl nodes,” which will exhibit unique electronic properties, such as zero resistance conduction. These points are considered to have wormhole-like characteristics, where electrons tunnel between opposite surfaces of the material. In previous experiment, the researchers found that the material structure can be adjusted by terahertz radiation pulse, thereby quickly switching between the topological and non-topological states of the material, effectively turning the zero-resistance state off and then on again. Zhang’s team has proved that the atomic-level thickness of two-dimensional materials greatly reduces the screening effect of the electric field, and its structure is easily affected by the electron concentration or electric field. Therefore, topological materials at two-dimensional limit can allow the turning of optical manipulation into electrical control, paving towards electronic devices.
    In this work, the researchers stacked three atomic layers of tungsten ditelluride metal layers, like nanoscale deck of cards. By injecting a small amount of carriers into the stack or applying a vertical electric field, they caused each odd-numbered layer to slide laterally relative to the even-numbered layers above and below it. Through the corresponding optical and electrical characterizations, they observed that this slip is permanent until another electrical excitation triggers layers to rearrange. Furthermore, in order to read the data and information stored between these moving atomic layers, the researchers used the extremely large “Berry curvature” in the semi-metallic material. This quantum characteristic is like a magnetic field, which can steer electrons’ propagation and result in nonlinear Hall effect. Through such effect, the arrangement of the atomic layer can be read without disturbing the stacking.
    Using this quantum characteristic, different stacks and metal polarization states can be distinguished well. This discovery solves the long-term reading difficulty in ferroelectric metals due to their weak polarization. This makes ferroelectric metals not only interesting in basic physical exploration, but also proves that such materials may have applicational prospects comparable to conventional semiconductors and ferroelectric insulators. Changing the stacking orders only involves the breaking of the Van der Waals bond. Therefore, the energy consumption is theoretically two orders of magnitude lower than the energy consumed by breaking covalent bond in traditional phase change materials and provides a new platform for the development of more energy-efficient storage devices and helps us move towards a sustainable and smart future.

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    New electronic skin can react to pain like human skin

    Researchers have developed electronic artificial skin that reacts to pain just like real skin, opening the way to better prosthetics, smarter robotics and non-invasive alternatives to skin grafts.
    The prototype device developed by a team at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, can electronically replicate the way human skin senses pain.
    The device mimics the body’s near-instant feedback response and can react to painful sensations with the same lighting speed that nerve signals travel to the brain.
    Lead researcher Professor Madhu Bhaskaran said the pain-sensing prototype was a significant advance towards next-generation biomedical technologies and intelligent robotics.
    “Skin is our body’s largest sensory organ, with complex features designed to send rapid-fire warning signals when anything hurts,” Bhaskaran said.
    “We’re sensing things all the time through the skin but our pain response only kicks in at a certain point, like when we touch something too hot or too sharp.

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    “No electronic technologies have been able to realistically mimic that very human feeling of pain — until now.
    “Our artificial skin reacts instantly when pressure, heat or cold reach a painful threshold.
    “It’s a critical step forward in the future development of the sophisticated feedback systems that we need to deliver truly smart prosthetics and intelligent robotics.”
    Functional sensing prototypes
    As well as the pain-sensing prototype, the research team has also developed devices using stretchable electronics that can sense and respond to changes in temperature and pressure.

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    Bhaskaran, co-leader of the Functional Materials and Microsystems group at RMIT, said the three functional prototypes were designed to deliver key features of the skin’s sensing capability in electronic form.
    With further development, the stretchable artificial skin could also be a future option for non-invasive skin grafts, where the traditional approach is not viable or not working.
    “We need further development to integrate this technology into biomedical applications but the fundamentals — biocompatibility, skin-like stretchability — are already there,” Bhaskaran said.
    How to make electronic skin
    The new research, published in Advanced Intelligent Systems and filed as a provisional patent, combines three technologies previously pioneered and patented by the team:
    Stretchable electronics: combining oxide materials with biocompatible silicon to deliver transparent, unbreakable and wearable electronics as thin as a sticker.
    Temperature-reactive coatings: self-modifying coatings 1,000 times thinner than a human hair based on a material that transforms in response to heat.
    Brain-mimicking memory: electronic memory cells that imitate the way the brain uses long-term memory to recall and retain previous information.
    The pressure sensor prototype combines stretchable electronics and long-term memory cells, the heat sensor brings together temperature-reactive coatings and memory, while the pain sensor integrates all three technologies.
    PhD researcher Md Ataur Rahman said the memory cells in each prototype were responsible for triggering a response when the pressure, heat or pain reached a set threshold.
    “We’ve essentially created the first electronic somatosensors — replicating the key features of the body’s complex system of neurons, neural pathways and receptors that drive our perception of sensory stimuli,” he said.
    “While some existing technologies have used electrical signals to mimic different levels of pain, these new devices can react to real mechanical pressure, temperature and pain, and deliver the right electronic response.
    “It means our artificial skin knows the difference between gently touching a pin with your finger or accidentally stabbing yourself with it — a critical distinction that has never been achieved before electronically.”
    The research was supported by the Australian Research Council and undertaken at RMIT’s state-of-the-art Micro Nano Research Facility for micro/nano-fabrication and device prototyping.

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    Materials provided by RMIT University. Original written by Gosia Kaszubska. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More