Stanford engineers create artificial skin that can send pressure sensation to brain cell From: Stanford News - 10/15/2105 By: Tom Abate Stanford engineers have created a plastic skin-like material that can detect pressure and deliver a Morse code-like signal directly to a living brain cell. The work takes a big step toward adding a sense of touch to prosthetic limbs. Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has spent a decade trying to develop a material that mimics skin's ability to flex and heal, while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain. Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb and replicate some of skin's sensory functions. Bao's work, reported today in Science, takes another step toward her goal by replicating one aspect of touch, the sensory mechanism that enables us to distinguish the pressure difference between a limp handshake and a firm grip. Read the entire article at: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/october/artificial-skin-bao-101515.html Links: Zhenan Bao https://profiles.stanford.edu/zhenan-bao https://baogroup.stanford.edu/index.php/zbao A skin-inspired organic digital mechanoreceptor http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6258/313.abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa9306