Skip to main content

New malleable 'electronic skin' self-healable, recyclable

As I searched through all the different articles to post a blog on, several of them caught my eye. However this particular article regarding "electronic skin" immediately grabbed my attention because of the numerous possible applications such a discovery could have on the medical community and how similar it was to an idea I had several years ago. With the recent advancements in cellular regeneration, I had the idea of lacing bandages with stem cells in hopes to assist in the healing process and possibly speed it up. The scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder have taken an idea similar to mine but have added a technological twist to it. They have created an artificial skin using robotics called E-skin, and although it may not be used to help heal wounds directly like I envisioned my idea would, it has helped in the fields of prosthetics as well as minor applications in daily medicine. 
The article mentioned the movie Terminator and how after the main villain has been shot or stabbed we see his skin regenerating within seconds to its almost perfect form. The scientist in Boulder said that "While the new process is not nearly as dramatic, the healing of cut or broken e-skin, including the sensors, is done by using a mix of three commercially available compounds in ethanol."

Another things that I found completely amazing was the application to robotics and human interaction. As we continue to make giant advancements in the field of robotics, it is hard to deny the fact that one day robots with perform task such as watching over our children.“In that case you would integrate e-skin on the robot fingers that can feel the pressure of the baby. The idea is to try and mimic biological skin with e-skin that has desired functions.”

B. Brimhall 


Comments

  1. UnknownApril 27, 2018 at 3:22 PM

    You really think that a robot could take a human role in caring for a child? I personally disagree because I have been able to be involved in studies on children and would say that if we went that route, child development and relations would be different. Children need care and feeling as part of their upbringing which would not be the case with a robot as it is needed as human interaction. I do find it very interesting and beneficial that they are able to be used in such a way to accelerate our healing process and reparation of the skin. That is a technology that, if can be cheap enough for the public, could change many things. Very interesting topic and well stated.

    -Tyler H.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 27, 2018 at 5:26 PM

    I hope that society never gets to the point where parent/child interactions are replaced by care-giving robots, but, unfortunately, many children today are already more influenced by the television and social media than by their parents. Behavioral psychologists, like Dr. Prem, and many parents are concerned that robots and technology are creating an ill-mannered generation through instant gratification and lack of manners. As a result, even Amazon is trying to address the issue by allowing parents to turn on a "politeness" setting on Alexa, so that children have to say please. As for the medicinal benefits of e-skin, I like the possible uses of e-skin and foresee it decreasing patient recovery time and chance of infection by sealing the wound and promoting healing. I'm interested to see what is done with e-skin and wonder if allowing NICU babies to lie on e-skin would positively affect the infants health, since babies that have skin contact with their mothers and/or fathers tend to maintain homeostasis more consistently.

    Baig, E.C. (2018). Kids were being rude to Alexa, so Amazon updated it. USA Today.
    Prem (2016). Is technology making children of today rude. Life Improving Guide.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kill The Pain But Not The Patient

               Opioid’s are a serious problem that according to Edward Bilsky, an opioid pharmacologist and provost at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, can potentially be eliminated. Opioid addiction is a problem that needs to be faced as soon as possible. Utah has many different ads that are sure to be seen driving on the freeway, but we are not the only state that has an issue. Many people have died and many more will continue to die “In 2015, 2 million Americans suffered from prescription opioid addiction, and more than 33,000 died of an opioid overdose” (pg. 44) There is a solution to the problem at hand.               In Jonathon Keats’ article, building a better Painkiller, Christopher Stein stumbled upon something that would change the way that opioids are researched. He noticed that among rats an inflamed leg would be numb to the effects of touch, but anot...
22 comments
Read more

Cell phones and Cancer?

Some recent studies are calling us to be more cautious about our cell phone usage. There have been some studies on lab rats over the last two years that have started linking cell phone usage to higher cancer rates. Basically what the experiment was, Scientists exposed a bunch of lab rats to about the same amount of RF radiation (Radio Frequency, the kind of radiation cell phones use to communicate with cell towers) cell phones and wireless routers and basically all of our modern internet devices, expose us to. Long story short the Rats had a noticeably higher rate of schwannomas, and cancer in glial cells than regular non-exposed rats.  There were some other really cool findings from the study too. For example only Male lab rats contracted Schwannomas (cancer of Schwann cells in nerve tissue) and only female lab rats were found to have glioma. (cancer in glial cells, cells that help brain cells) They also found higher levels of other types of cancer such as skin cancer, prostat...
11 comments
Read more

Stem Cell Research and its Importance

Over the last few years there has been lots of research done regarding stem cell research, to regenerate and fix damaged organs in the body. With the help of stem cell research there has been much discovered about the body in general which helps to advance the cause of medicine helping to finding cures and treatments for different diseases and disorders. To show some of the research I am writing this blog post on, “Targeted Repair of Heart Injury by Stem Cells Fused with Platelet Nanovesicles.”             I have chosen this paper because it illustrates different discoveries scientist have had while finding a way to potentially help stem cells to regenerate cardiac tissue following a myocardial infarction or a heart attack. Through the course of this paper, Junnan Tang and the other scientists he was working with talked about one of the hardest issues regarding cardiac stem cells which is the fact that they have a hard time impla...
4 comments
Read more