A healthy human can do any work flexibly, without health we are nothing. Elders say that if you lose health, you lose many things, so keeping ourselves healthy is very important.
Though today’s unhealthy foods is making our health complicated we are still surviving. Though there are complications, with the help of the modern technology most of the diseases can be cured.
Skin is the largest organ in the human body and has a wide variety of interesting properties such as stretchability, self-healing ability, high mechanical toughness, and tactile sensing capability.
Human skin is soft and stretchy and has millions of nerve endings that sense heat and touch. This makes it a superb instrument for detecting and responding to the outside world.
Electronic skin refers to flexible, stretchable and self-healing electronics that are able to mimic functionalities of human or animal skin. The broad class of materials often contain sensing abilities that are intended to reproduce the capabilities of human skin to respond to environmental factors such as changes in heat and pressure.
The applications of e-skin vary widely, however, the key application areas are in the wearable or skin attachable devices, robotics, and prosthetics.
In the early 2000s introduced the concept of electronic skin referred to as “sensitive skin” and was defined as “a large-area, flexible array of sensors with data processing capabilities, which can be used to cover the entire surface of a machine or even a part of a human body
In 2018, Zou et al. published work on electronic skin that is able to reform covalent bonds when damaged.
The e-skin developed by the group consists of a network of covalently bound polymers that are thermoset, meaning cured at a specific temperature. However, the material is also recyclable and reusable. Because the polymer network is thermoset, it is chemically and thermally stable. However, at room temperature, the polyimine material, with or without silver nanoparticles, can be dissolved on the timescale of a few hours. The recycling process allows devices, which are damaged beyond self-healing capabilities, to be dissolved and formed into new devices.This advance opens the door for lower cost production and greener approaches to e-skin development.
Developing mechanically flexible and stretchable materials similar to the human epidermis was challenging when the fabrication of high-performance e-skin sensors was attempted.
The e-skin uses thermal sensors and actuators to precisely map the temperature and thermal conductivity of the skin near a wound to prevent it from worsening or becoming infected.
Sensors and transmitters are integrated into flexible and stretchable films, patches, bandages or tattoos which collect the data and feed them into machine-learning algorithms for monitoring vital parameters, patient abnormalities and also for tracking treatments.
The materials used in stretchable skin sensors can be classified under two categories. One category includes intrinsically stretchable materials such as elastomers, liquid metals, and composite materials. The other category includes solid metals, semiconductors, polymers, and inorganic compounds.