Electrical design of structurally tunable skin overlays

Current on-skin interfaces focus on enabling electronic circuitry and display-like output on top of the skin, but to the best of our knowledge interfaces for tuning the texture or stiffness of the skin itself are unexplored. We present SkinMorph, a second skin layer that alters its texture and color due to attached electronic control circuitry. Modular electrical design of the system includes a bare-bones processor board with three optional, interchangeable, stackable peripheral modules: a programming and debugging module, a Bluetooth module, and an accelerometer module. The modular circuits in tandem with customizable silicone injection molds allow for adaptation to a variety of applications, resulting in a system which affords some physical protection via tuning the skin overlay characteristics on various areas of the body. Particular attention is paid to on-skin challenges such as electrical and heat safety, miniaturization of circuit components, and skin-safe material choices. The entire system including battery, control board and peripherals, and tunable skin overlay can be mounted on the body without a wired tether impeding the user.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Bamforth, Miren

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chris Schmandt.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119543

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119543