Skip to main content

LED-studded ‘electronic skin’ monitors your health, makes you look like a cyborg

In many ways, the future of healthcare will depend on “self care,” or patients caring for their own health using all technologies at their disposal. That might mean scouring the internet for nutrition facts about a meal, strapping a fitness tracker to your wrist before a jog, or reviewing a doctor’s recommendations based on a DNA test. Either way, people who take hold of their health will tend to live healthier lives.

Around the world, researchers are developing wearables to put power in patients’ hands and help them monitor physiological conditions, from heart rate to blood alcohol level.

This “electronic skin” display uses nanomesh electrodes to pick up on electrical signals from the heart.

Now, a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo has developed an ultrathin, breathable, and stretchable display that can be worn directly on the skin. This “electronic skin” display uses nanomesh electrodes to pick up on electrical signals from the heart, allowing it to monitor cardiovascular health and display data for the patient to view in real time via micro LEDs. The data can also be transferred wirelessly to a smartphone.

“Global aging is widely perceived as one of the most significant risks to global prosperity,” Takao Someya, an engineer and head of the University of Tokyo’s Someya Research Group, who developed the display, told Digital Trends. “In order to find the possible solutions to this pressing issue, home healthcare system in which people are responsible for their own health is getting more and more important. To build a home healthcare system, we need to foster age-friendly accessibility to information.”

Many of these wearable sensors are either relatively narrow in their ability to collect biometric data or else a bit bulky to wear, but the goal is to develop these wearable sensors to be broad in scope and practically unnoticeable to wear. The displays developed by the Someya Research Group fits into the “narrow but not bulky” category, in that it serves as an electrocardiogram but attaches unobtrusively to the skin.

“Our skin display can be nicely fitted on the skin due to its stretchability,” Someya said. “It exhibits simple graphics with motion including an electrocardiogram waveform measured with our skin sensors. It is the first stretchable display to achieve superior durability and stability in air. We have combined skin sensors with skin displays. Skin sensors realize comfortable, accurate, and safe data collections, [while] skin displays achieve natural, intuitive, and safe feedback.”

Moving forward, the researchers will work to refine the performance and reliability of their wearable, including increasing its resolution and aiming to make it full color. But, with these challenges complete, Someya sees devices like his ushering in more accessible and empowering healthcare.

Researchers want devices like these
to usher in a more accessible and empowering healthcare.

“Skin electronics will enhance information accessibility for the elderly people or people with disabilities, who tend to have difficulty operating and obtaining data from existing devices,” he said. “The current aging society requires user-friendly wearable sensors for monitoring patient vitals in order to reduce the burden on patients and family members providing nursing care. Our system could serve as one of the long-awaited solutions to fulfill this need, which will ultimately lead to improving the quality of life.”

Someday presented his findings last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more