With the popularisation of digital initiatives directed at the healthcare and consumer care industry, this is an another great article that explores the capability of an electronic touch-sensing system.

The paper starts off with a simple flowchart illustration of the electronic skin (e-skin) system, providing a clear visualisation for the readers. Next, using the approach of digital signalling processing (DSP) based field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the authors demonstrated real-time classification of input touch modalities. While there are still a couple of technical hurdles before the technology becomes broadly accessible (e.g. high power consumption and requiring a more comprehensive classification framework), the potential applications for digital e-skin are massive. Can you name some of them? Share with us and comment below.

For those of you that are concerned about understanding the algorithms used in this paper, I will suggest you skip those sessions for now. Leave the scientific portions to the professional researchers, but try to appreciate the potential of machine learning and how it can be integrated into your daily lifestyle. This is a short paper that can help you to begin exploring the digital and technological advancement over the years.  You never know, you might be able to provide great insights from a consumer perspective. And this is exactly what the scientific community needs – a quick reality check of the consumer demands, applications and concerns. Play a role in shaping the digital future by sharing with us your thoughts.

References

Ibrahim, A., Gastaldo, P., Chible, H. and Valle, M. (2017). Real-Time Digital Signal Processing Based on FPGAs for Electronic Skin Implementation †. Sensors, 17(3), p.558.