Electronic skin for prosthetics to sense temperature and pressure | Hacker News Reader

Electronic skin for prosthetics to sense temperature and pressure

news.wsu.edu

58 pointsgmays6 comments

The robots will love this.

There are already some products for arms that do this.

There are also promising applications for this in XR hardware; haptic gloves and bodysuits are a logical next-step for accurate fine-grained sensation reproduction in simulations.

I foresee a future where prosthetics and XR hardware share mutual advancements and use simulations as a test bed.

XR hardware needs actors, this is about sensors.

An actor that changes temperature is a heater or maybe something like a peltier element, that can heat and cool. A sensor is the opposite: a thermometer that measures what temperature is somewhere.

Needless to say these are fundamentally different technologies. Sure, you need one to develope the other: e.g. to create a temperature sensing skin with high spatial resolution, you will need to generate precise spatial temperatures to test the whole thing.

Yes, the skin sensor technology in the article is about translating real world heat and touch sensations into electrical signals that can be interpreted by human nervous systems via prosthetics.

XR haptics, on the other hand, convert electrical signals into real world sensations.

While the two technologies are fundamentally different, they are also complementary. The process of 'serializing' and 'deserializing' analog touch data into a digital data storage format has multiple cross purpose applications.

Yes, which is precisely what I said, in different words. Now hardware iterative cycles are different than in software, where you can just define perfect interfaces and get a lossless roundtrip between them. In hardware you always have loss, so sometimes that software analogy does not work.

To have an actuator that is useful to measure you skin sensor, that actuator does not only need to be complimentary, it needs to be better than the sensor (otherwise you're only measuring the flaws of the actuator). So quite often you will need to take a different approach than just a complimentary actuator/sensor-pair and make one of the two a specialized overly accurate and incredibly pricey fixture.

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