People’s palms have a tendency to sweat when they are excited or worried, which might give us a good indication of how we are feeling. This reaction is used to assess emotional stress and assist people who are experiencing difficulties with their mental health. However, the devices that are currently utilized to perform this measurement are cumbersome, unreliable, and can contribute to the perpetuation of social stigma by attaching extremely visible sensors on prominent regions of the body.
The growing technology of electronic tattoos (e-tattoos) has been utilized by researchers at Texas A&M University and The University of Texas at Austin for this form of monitoring, which is referred to as electrodermal activity sensing or EDA sensing.
The researchers developed an electronic tattoo made of graphene that can be attached to the palm of the hand, is practically undetectable, and can communicate with a smartwatch. Their findings were presented in a new report that was recently published in Nature Communications.
Since many years ago, Lu and her colleagues have been working to advance technologies for wearable electronic tattoos. Because of its incredibly low thickness as well as its superior ability to accurately assess the electrical potential emanating from the human body, graphene has emerged as a material of choice in recent years.
However, materials of this extreme thinness cannot withstand much tension, if any at all. Therefore, it is difficult to apply them to regions of the body that involve a lot of motion, such as the palm and the wrist, because of this factor.
The discovery’s pièce de résistance is how the e-tattoo on the palm is able to properly transmit information to a rigid circuit while the subject is moving around outside of a laboratory setting. They utilized a ribbon in the shape of a serpent, which had two layers of graphene and gold that were partially overlapping one another.
