And now the next frontier of wearable devices has arrived. SkinLink is a DIY toolkit capable of creating customisable circuits on the skin and developed by engineers at the Hybrid Body Lab at Cornell University. By enabling anyone to create flexible and easily adjustable, stretchable circuits on skin, SkinLink makes it possible to build devices that work on your skin, anywhere you want, such as biometric sensing or even creative wearables.
What Makes SkinLink Stand Out?
Fixed designs for circuitry, such as button electrodes, utilise rigid ribbon cables or rigid electrodes that may become uncomfortable with repeated use, requiring users and/or researchers to re-apply these on the skin. SkinLink begins to address these limitations by taking advantage of flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) and stretchable connectors that allow the circuits to follow natural body movements and, with this freedom of movement, reduce comfort discomfort over time. Further, by using FPCBs as a platform, it’s possible to reconfigure circuits directly on the skin, allowing users to make real-time adjustments.
A Toolkit for Customization and Flexibility
But it is also a matter of allowing users to have full control of the wearable technology through cerebral command. The SkinLink system frees the designer of the wearable device from designing the electrical circuit on a rigid substrate: a modified electrical capacitor can perform many of those functions, but because the circuit can be augmented in-situ, it is no longer limited to a rigid, fixed design. Users can tweak the configuration of the electrical circuit right on their skin to suit different applications: for example, a continuous health-monitoring or motion-tracking wearable.
First, it takes advantage of the body’s natural properties – contours and motions, especially around joints and along curves. In contrast to a circuit mounted on a rigid surface, a flexible circuit conforms to curves in the skin much better. Similarly, a flexible circuit will stretch more slowly and smoothly to accommodate natural body movements, reducing the probability of tears and slippage as opposed to those on a rigid surface. Second, the natural properties of the materials allow the circuits to be peeled off and repositioned, which makes prototyping easier.
Practical Applications: From Health to Creative Expression
SkinLink allows for widely different applications from advanced biometric sensing to referential circuit tattoos The ability to tune a system in real-time potentially enables novel functionality: spending enough time with different settings can help identify which ones are ‘better’ for your own body. For example, you could trial monitoring of baseline vital signs, or forms of body-based interactions for wearable tech art.
Using 14 subjects to demonstrate how it worked, the study showed that SkinLink was faster and had more flexibility than the previous methods tested and was effective for both health-related wearables and wearable tech concepts used for creative endeavours, for both novices and experts. Finally, the team conducted four case studies on how it was used to accomplish different things, from special effects makeup to wearable-tech-concept designs, proving (perhaps literally) that it was useful for a variety of projects.
The Future of Wearable Technology
[Images from https://www.hybridbody.human.cornell.edu/skinlink/]
In addition to being a ready-to-use toolkit, SkinLink opens the door to the future of wearable technology. By combining ease of use with versatile design and comfort, it offers a new approach for anyone wishing to prototype or experiment on-skin circuits. Wearable technologies and biometric sensors engineers can now better focus on their core research thanks to an easier-to-use electronics element on the skin. And, designers can afford exploring new lines of aesthetics and emotional connectivity knowing there is a new tool in their prototyping process.
This is a transformative moment for wearable tech: many industries are primed to adopt on-skin interfaces, and SkinLink’s circuits, which are both reconfigurable and stretchable, could soon be a go-to tool for prototyping creative as well as functional applications.
SkinLink is still very much a proof of concept, although already seems capable of promising advances in everything from health monitoring to tech-fetish body art.
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