Liquid metal sensors bring touch sensation to prosthetics

The human fingertip has over 3,000 touch receptors that largely respond to pressure, enabling the manipulation of objects. This sense of touch is so far missing in dexterous prosthetics, leading to objects being dropped or crushed by a prosthetic hand.

To enable a more natural feeling prosthetic hand interface, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science and collaborators said they are the first to incorporate stretchable tactile sensors using liquid metal on the fingertips of a prosthetic hand.

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Encapsulated within silicone-based elastomers, this technology is claimed to provide advantages over traditional sensors, including high conductivity, compliance, flexibility and stretchability. The team’s study is detailed in Sensors.

For the study researchers used individual fingertips on the prosthesis to distinguish between different speeds of a sliding motion along different textured surfaces. The four different textures had one variable parameter, which was the distance between the ridges.