Intelligent Rehabilitation by Skin Electronics based Human Machine Interface

Damage of motor nerves affects a large population worldwide. Without proper treatment, severe loss of motor and sensory function can be a result of patients suffering from motor nerve damages, seriously affecting their quality of life. Therefore, the demand for rehabilitation services in society is rapidly growing. Developing new technologies for this purpose will allow more people with disabilities or chronic illnesses to seize the ‘Golden Recovery Period’. Skin is the largest organ of the human body. It not only senses the adjacent environment, but also responds to environmental changes by means of thermal, chemical/electrochemical, and physical actuation, which can serve as the key interface for rehabilitation. The recent advances in wearable human-machine interfaces towards sensing the body activity to interact with machines prove this concept. However, the existing wearable human-machine interface lacks effective physical feedback, which limits the closed-loop interaction between the human body and devices like rehabilitation systems. The development of skin electronic systems that can simultaneously collect users’ body activity information and provide useful haptic feedbacks is considered one of the most demanding yet challenging topics to realize close-loop interaction for wearable electronics, soft robotics, and advanced human-machine interfaces such as prosthetics. This project aims at developing advanced materials, devices, and integration strategies for skin electronics that enable the intelligent Sensing and Actuation, which possesses the ability to accurately detect body activities, adapt and react to these changes through intelligent actuation, and achieve intelligent rehabilitation.