In the medical world, there are many ways to look under the skin, such as MRIs, X-rays, and sonograms. Researchers at China’s Wuyi University have now created a robotic finger that could offer another way to analyze human shape. Their bionic fingers can detect structures such as blood vessels, tissue, and bone that exist beneath the skin.
“We were inspired by the human finger, which has the most sensitive sense of touch we know,” said senior author Jianyi Luo, a professor at the university. “For example, if you touch your body with your fingers, you can feel not only the texture of your skin, but also the contours of the bones underneath.”
Bionic fingers actually look more like tattoo guns than fingers. The tip is made of carbon fiber and will compress more or less when it encounters softer and harder materials.
A bionic finger can create a three-dimensional image of what it touches based on its own contraction and reaction of the materials it encounters. Not only is the surface of the material scanned, but the underlying structure is also rendered in 3D. In this regard, it’s a step ahead of the shape-sensing Bionic Finger System developed at MIT a few years ago and his BionicSoftHand created before it.
“Our bionic fingers go beyond previous artificial sensors that were only able to recognize and discriminate by contour, surface texture and hardness,” said study co-author and lecturer at Wuyi University. said Zhiming Chen.
In testing, fingers were presented with different structures to map. These included a hard letter “A” covered with a layer of soft silicone, and various shapes ranging from soft to hard, also covered with silicone. Not only was the finger able to easily map the hard letter ‘A’ shape, but it was also able to discern the soft shape underneath the soft silicone.
To see how bionic fingers work for human mapping, the research team created a structure composed of artificial bone and silicon ‘muscle’ tissue. We then found that the touch of the probe was sensitive enough to find simulated blood vessels embedded in artificial tissue.
“Similar to a doctor’s palpation, bionic fingers can recognize simple tissue structures in the human body, but recognition of complex 3D structures still needs some work,” the researchers wrote. increase. “Importantly, bionic fingers can reconstruct 3D profiles of tissue structures, thus making palpation both visual and scientific. It shows great promise for subsurface tactile tomography.”
The researchers also believe that bionic finger systems could help spot errors in flexible electronics such as sweat-powered wearable batteries and stretchable display screens. , they ran their fingers through a flexible circuit system and were successful in finding areas with erroneous holes and cuts that could prevent the system from functioning properly.
“This haptic technology opens up non-optical methods for non-destructive inspection of the human body and flexible electronics,” says Luo. “Next, we hope to develop the bionic finger’s ability for omnidirectional detection using different surface materials.”
The study was reported in the journal, Cells report physical sciences.
Source: Cell Press by EurekAlert
