Towards the integration of e-skin into prosthetic devices

Endowing appliances with the capability of sensing and processing touch enables tactile interaction between electronic devices and the environment. E-skin organized as a set of multiple sensing components and integrated with a dedicated embedded electronic system can implement the communication link between e-skin and surroundings. Basing the analysis on a relevant application example (i.e. human prosthetics), the present study describes a system including an electronic skin and a stimulation unit. The overall system was validated and tested in eight healthy subjects, who were asked to recognize the shape, position and direction of a set of dynamic mechanical stimuli presented on the electronic skin. The results demonstrated that tactile information was successfully translated from a mechanical interaction applied on the e-skin into electrotactile patterns, which the subjects could recognize with a good performance. As the obtained results are promising, in this paper the challenging requirements for the integration of e-skin into prosthetic devices were assessed, mainly focusing on computational complexity of the embedded data processing unit.