Magnetosensitive E‐Skins for Interactive Devices

Abstract

Electronic skins (e‐skins) have established themselves as a versatile technology to restore or enhance human perception, and potentially enable softer robotics. So far, the focus has been mostly on reproducing the traditional functions associated with human skin, such as, temperature, pressure, and chemical detection. New developments have also introduced nonstandard sensing capabilities like magnetic field detection, to spawn the field of magnetosensitive e‐skins. Adding a supplementary information channel—an electronic sixth sense—allows humans to utilize the surrounding magnetic fields as stimuli for touchless interactions. Due to their vectorial nature, these stimuli can be used to track motion and orientation in 3D, opening the door to various kinds of gestural control for interactive devices. This approach to tracking provides an alternative or complement to optic‐based systems, which usually rely on cameras or infrared emitters, that cannot easily capture fine motion when objects are far from the source or the line‐of‐sight is obtruded. Here, the background, fabrication techniques, and recent advances of this field are reviewed; covering important aspects like: directional perception, geomagnetic field detection, on‐site conditioning, and multimodal approaches. The aim is to give the reader a general perspective and highlight some new avenues of research, toward artificial magnetoception.

Magnetized Micropillar-Enabled Wearable Sensors for Touchless and Intelligent Information Communication

“…S19). With the advantages of high sensitivity, magnetic poles distinguishability, facile fabrication, low-energy consumption, etc., our proposed sensor is therefore competitive to many reported magneto-sensitive smart skins including anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR), giant magnetoresistance (GMR), magneto-impedance (GMI) and Hall sensor [21,[40][41][42][43][44][45]. To our knowledge, AMR, GMR, and GMI sensors mostly fail to recognize the magnetic poles because they produce the monotonous (positive) electric signal under each pole of the magnetic field [46,47].…”

Soft Tactile Sensing Skins for Robotics

“…Another class of magnetosensitive skins are based on changes in magnetic fields within the environment. Such sensors are described in more detail in a recent review paper by Canon Bermudez et al [77].…”

New Dimension in Magnetism and Superconductivity: 3D and Curvilinear Nanoarchitectures

“…(iii) Curved Magnetic Field Sensors: There are intensive application-oriented activities on the use of mechanically compliant magnetic field sensors. This research field is known as shapeable magnetoelectronics [40,41,400] and includes flexible, [51,[401][402][403][404][405][406][407][408][409][410][411][412][413][414][415] printable, [416][417][418][419][420] stretchable, [409,[420][421][422] and mechanically imperceptible [42][43][44]409,415,422,423] magnetosensitive elements. Thus, the magnetoelectronics is find itself in the following applications: tracking displacement and rotation of magnetic field in conventional machinery; [409,411,424,425] orientation in space; [42,43] accurate control of actuation; [44,409,415] motion tracking and touchless humanmachine interaction.…”

“…Thus, the magnetoelectronics is find itself in the following applications: tracking displacement and rotation of magnetic field in conventional machinery; [409,411,424,425] orientation in space; [42,43] accurate control of actuation; [44,409,415] motion tracking and touchless humanmachine interaction. [42][43][44]400,420] Despite these numerous applications and relatively high technology level, commercial shapeable magnetoelectronic products are absent. (iv) Biomedical Applications: Until recently, biomedical magnetic applications were limited by their empirical experimental studies of geometrically induced effects related only to the shape asymmetry and chirality of magnetic objects.…”