ANDRZEJ KRAUZEThinner than plastic wrap and lighter than a feather, electronic skin, also known as smart skin or imperceptible electronics, detects information about the internal and external environments. Such technology has been in development for wearable medical instruments, health monitors, prosthetics with sensory feedback, and even robotic skin. Now, scientists are expanding electronic skin into the realm of the once-impossible: endowing humans with a sixth sense.
“There have been many kinds of physiological and/or electrophysiological sensors for wearable electronics,” Dae-Hyeong Kim of Seoul National University told The Scientist in an email. In 2014, for example, Kim and his colleagues developed a smart prosthetic skin that could sense pressure, temperature, and humidity and was equipped with stretchable electrode arrays for nerve stimulation (Nat Commun, 5:5747). But while sensors exist that can duplicate or enhance human senses, no one has yet developed a smart skin to detect a new type of stimuli. No one, that is, until Denys Makarov of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany, set his sights on sensing magnetic fields, which people have no natural ability to detect.
“It would truly be a sixth-sense technology,” says Makarov. “Artificial magnetoreception is something ...
