Human skin sensing of mechanical stimuli originates from transduction of mechanoreceptors that converts external forces into electrical signals. Although imitating the spatial distribution of those mechanoreceptors can enable developments of electronic skins capable of decoupled sensing of normal/shear forces and strains, it remains elusive. We report a three-dimensionally (3D) architected electronic skin (denoted as 3DAE-Skin) with force and strain sensing components arranged in a 3D layout that mimics that of Merkel cells and Ruffini endings in human skin. This 3DAE-Skin shows excellent decoupled sensing performances of normal force, shear force, and strain and enables development of a tactile system for simultaneous modulus/curvature measurements of an object through touch. Demonstrations include rapid modulus measurements of fruits, bread, and cake with various shapes and degrees of freshness.
Post-surgical treatments of the human throat often require continuous monitoring of diverse vital and muscle activities. However, wireless, continuous monitoring and analysis of these activities directly from the throat skin have not been developed. Here, we report the design and validation of a fully integrated standalone stretchable device platform that provides wireless measurements and machine learning-based analysis of diverse vibrations and muscle electrical activities from the throat. We demonstrate that the modified composite hydrogel with low contact impedance and reduced adhesion provides high-quality long-term monitoring of local muscle electrical signals. We show that the integrated triaxial broad-band accelerometer also measures large body movements and subtle physiological activities/vibrations. We find that the combined data processed by a 2D-like sequential feature extractor with fully connected neurons facilitates the classification of various motion/speech features at a high accuracy of over 90%, which adapts to the data with noise from motion artifacts or the data from new human subjects. The resulting standalone stretchable device with wireless monitoring and machine learning-based processing capabilities paves the way to design and apply wearable skin-interfaced systems for the remote monitoring and treatment evaluation of various diseases.