New Way to Create Stretchable Electronic Tattoos
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University discusses a new way of creating electronic tattoos. Circuits are made of silver nanoparticles and printed on the same film used for commercial temporary tattoos. The silver nanoparticles are coated with a liquid metal alloy that fuses with the silver to create conductive wires on the tattoo. The conductivity is high enough to support digital circuit functionality, which remains even as it is stretched. These electronic tattoos have applications that range from health care to personal electronic devices.
Transcript
00:00:11 We’re reporting a new way of creating electronic tattoos. These are circuits that are printed on temporary tattoo film, just like, you know, you can just buy commercially, that’s used for a children’s tattoo. The way that we use this tattoo film is we print circuits made of silver nanoparticles, and then what we do is we coat those silver nanoparticles with a liquid metal alloy. And the liquid metal fuses with the silver to create these conductive wires on the tattoo. The tattoo can easily be transferred to skin and the conductivity is high enough to support digital circuit functionally. The circuit remains functional even as it stretches. So we would use the electronic tattoo to create circuits that could go on the body to power
00:01:03 any types of devices that you want mounted to your skin. One example could be a touch interface that would augment any kind of wearable electronic, or personal electronic device that you could have. It could also be used to wire up an accelerometer that could track your body motion. Electronic tattoos like the one we’ve developed could be used for applications in health care. It could be used for physiological monitoring. It could be used for gaming, or pretty much any other application where you would want electronics that either track your motion or can measure your vitals that would be in intimate contact with your skin. Just like any temporary tattoo, we can easily just wash off when you don’t want to use
00:01:49 it anymore, and it’s unobtrusive. You can have it under your clothing, or you could just have it on your skin but not worry about having it impair your natural motion.