“Sensitive skin” is the delicate name for a visionary technology: thin flexible large-area sensor arrays. With sensitive skin, one could endow robots with the information-gathering tools they need to work in unstructured environments; one could clothe heart patients with shirts that monitor arrhythmia; one could equip food handlers with gloves that detect spoiled meat. The applications of sensitive skin are many, varied, and—unfortunately—out of reach.
The applications remain visions, but not because scientists and engineers can’t make suitable sensors or flexible substrates on which to put them. Stretchable fabrics and materials have been around for years. And sensors, like the sequins on an ice skater’s costume, can be made small enough that they’re unaffected when a substrate bends, twists, or stretches.
But sequins, unlike the sensors on sensitive skin, don’t need conducting interconnects to function. Pulling on a glove, for example, involves deforming the material by 10% or more, but...
