Skin Tattoo Serves to Control Electronic Devices

Skin Tattoo Serves to Control Electronic Devices

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Researchers from MIT have developed a way to turn your skin into a touch interface for your devices using gold leaf tattoos — and it’s way cheaper than other on-skin interface fabrication processes.

The process involves simple materials: vinyl film, thin tattoo paper, adhesive, and gold leaf sheets. These are layered on and cut based on a stencil that can be made through any design software. Surface-mount electronics are then punched through a small hole in the tattoo paper. This attaches them to the gold leaf which functions as the conductive material.

Futurism.com reported that the whole process can be mass produced by machine, or created by users manually. Users would apply this onto skin, just like a temporary tattoo—by sticking it face-down on your skin and dampening it with water.

So far, the team has used the gold leaf tattoo interfaces for three main functions. First, they used it as an input device, specifically as a controller for a music player. They created design stencils of traditional user interfaces like buttons, sliders, and 2D trackpads.

Next, they also tried it as an output display that changes color and lights up based on emotion or temperature using thermochromic pigments, which change to one of its two states when heated beyond body temperature.

They also tested the interface as a wireless communication device that uses near field communication (NFC) tags. This means data can be sent from the tattoo to mobile phones with NFC capabilities. By their estimate, a 3 x 4 square centimeter gold leaf tattoo interface with an NFC tag would only cost less than $2.50.

Electronic tattoos can read soldiers’ data on field and even help them control robots and electronic devices without adding extra weight to their equipment.

“We believe that in the future, on-skin electronics will form a DuoSkin integrated to the extent that it has seemingly disappeared,” the team notes on their site.