The smart glove that is fooling the brain into feeling everything from texture to temperature.
The smart glove that could give surgeons ‘supersense’ in their fingertips
- Smart glove could fool brain into feeling virtual temperatures and textures
- Can incorporate medical instruments and sensors
- Fingertip could also allow robots to carry out surgery more effectively
It could dramatically change the way surgery is carried out, and even change the way we play computer games.
Researchers today revealed the first ‘smart fingertips’.
The electronic fingers are molded to the user’s hand and have the ability to transmit electric signals to the skin.
The team hopes to one day incorporate the devices into a smart glove that creates virtual sensations, fooling the brain into feeling everything from texture to temperature.
Such gloves could be used in medical procedures such as local ablations and ultrasound scans.
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and Dalian University of Technology have published their study in IOP Publishing’s journal Nanotechnology.
Offering guidelines to the creation of these electrotactile stimulation devices for use on surgeons’ fingertips, their paper is said to describe the materials, fabrication strategies and device designs using ultra-thin, stretchable, silicon-based electronics and soft sensors that can be mounted onto an artificial ‘skin’ and fitted to fingertips.