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Phoenix666 writes:

ScienceX:

Existing e-skins and wearable devices primarily focus on monitoring physiological parameters like heart rate and can't assess health information at the molecular level. Moreover, they typically require batteries to power them, and the batteries need to be recharged frequently.

Despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, there are no reports of self-powered e-skins that are able to perform biosensing and transmit the information via standard Bluetooth wireless communications. This comes down to the lack of power efficiency. There is a need for a self-powered device that can continuously collect molecular as well as physical information and wirelessly transmit the information to other devices.

The approach we take to harvesting energy from the human body is based on biofuel cells. Fuel cells convert chemical energy to electricity. The biofuel cells we developed for our e-skin convert the lactic acid in human sweat to electricity. In addition to the biofuel cells, the e-skin contains biosensors that can analyze metabolic information like glucose, urea and pH levels, to monitor for diabetes, ischaemia another health conditions, as well as physical information like skin temperature. The e-skin, made of soft materials and attached to a person's skin, performs real-time biosensing, powered solely by sweat.

Journal Reference:
Y. Yu et al., "Biofuel-powered soft electronic skin with multiplexed and wireless sensing for human-machine interfaces," [$] Science Robotics (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aaz7946).

Cool appliqué. Can I get one that says, "AC⚡DC Rulez!"?

Original Submission