Researchers have developed a wearable patch that can detect hazards in the environment, such as dangerous gases or heavy metals in water, and notify the wearer by vibrating the skin. The researchers also extended their work to create “e-skins” for robotic devices that allow robots to detect and avoid hazards in the environment.
We already have sensors that can detect environmental hazards and send notifications to your phone, but we wanted to improve on that. This work had two goals. First, they wanted to miniaturize the sensor and incorporate it into a wearable patch to identify potential risks to the wearer. ”
Elim Uznooglu, first author of the paper on this research, received his Ph.D. North Carolina State University students
“Secondly, you need to know as soon as possible if you might come into contact with a dangerous substance. And if notifications are sent to your phone, you might not see them right away. So we wanted to incorporate haptic technology into the patch so that it vibrates as soon as a danger is detected, allowing people to respond quickly to potential threats.”
For this study, the researchers created a square patch slightly smaller than a driver’s license. The patch contains a microcontroller that acts as the brain of the patch. very small battery. Sensors that monitor six environmental hazards. and a small actuator that acts as a tactile motor that vibrates against the skin. The outside of the patch also incorporates an array of thin-film solar cells, which allows the device to collect solar power while being worn.
“It’s not enough just to hear the motor hum; you need to actually feel it,” says study co-author Oluwatobi Ojuade, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. “So we designed a surface with small bumps at the interface between the motor and the skin, almost like a pattern of small bumps. By changing the size and spacing of these bumps, we were able to control how the vibrations were perceived against the skin. This allowed us to fine-tune the sensation so that it actually caught our attention, rather than just feeling like a faint sound that we might miss.”
The device also triggers a different “haptic sequence,” or vibration pattern, each time it detects a hazard. This allows the wearer to determine which environmental hazards they need to be aware of.
“Proof-of-concept testing showed that the device does an excellent job of detecting hazardous substances and triggering an immediate tactile response,” Uznoglu said. “We also found that energy harvesting technology is effective in extending battery life. Coupled with the sensor’s low power demand, the device can function for about 24 hours.”
When the researchers were developing the patch, they wondered if they could extend this concept to use in robotic devices, allowing robots to detect and respond to hazards in their environments. That led to the development of something called e-skin.
E-skins essentially layer a sensor patch on top of a layer of piezoelectric material. When the sensor detects a hazard and triggers a tactile response, it creates a vibration against the piezoelectric layer, which generates an electrical signal that can be detected by the robot.
In proof-of-concept testing, the e-skin enabled a quadrupedal robot to detect hazards and change its route to avoid those hazards.
“Patches and electronic skins are primarily made using off-the-shelf components, with very few custom-designed elements,” said Amay Bandodkar, co-corresponding author of the paper and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “This should make it easier to scale up the technology in the future. The concept is also very flexible. The sensor array is modular, so you can add or remove sensors that monitor the hazards most relevant to your application.”
“It’s really amazing that we can encode tactile signals into materials with different properties, something that has been very difficult until now, especially in real-world situations where people want to wear devices,” said co-corresponding author Lillian Hsiao, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Combining what people wear with advanced sensing capabilities and the ability to alert users is something we’ve been working on for years.”
The paper “Multimodal wearable sensor with tactile communication capabilities for human and robot applications” was published in the journal device. The paper was co-authored by North Carolina State University postdoctoral researchers Mahaboobatcha Aleem and Rajaram Kaveti. North Carolina State University undergraduates Krish Kattoparia and Kyle Hsu; Veena Misra, MC Dean’s Distinguished Professor and interim dean of the North Carolina State University College of Engineering.
This research was supported by National Eye Institute grant R01EY032584-05.
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north carolina state university
Reference magazines:
Uznoglu, Belgiumothers. (2026). Multimodal wearable sensors with tactile communication capabilities for human and robotic applications. device. https://www.cell.com/device/abstract/S2666-9986(26)00197-3
