Hsin-Liu Kao, Chris Schmandt and Andres Calvo from MIT were fascinated by wearable devices but wanted to build a better wearable system. When researching current wearable products they found the manufacturing processes too expensive and the materials too exotic, coming mostly from medical or material science companies. Their goal was to create durable and skin-safe user interfaces that could be placed on the skin and available to anyone.
Teaming with Christian Holz and Asta Roseway from Microsoft Research, DuoSkin was created as a family of devices using gold leaf as the base material. DuoSkin attaches directly to the skin, is incredibly thin, and proved to be a great material for prototyping ideas using commercially available materials.
Three classes of DuoSkin have been developed. The first application is an input device, and the skin designs resemble buttons, sliders or trackpads. The capacitance of a user's touch against the sensors on the skin give input to devices. Output is the second application, and DuoSkin can be used as a soft display mechanism using thermochromic and heating elements. Pigments used for the displays were already available and certified for use with foods or toys. The team says that DuoSkin chose appearance over resolution, looking more like body art that glows than an LED array on a standard wearable. Both the input and output devices require a connection to a microcontroller with the current favorite being an Arduino Mini and a lithium polymer battery.
The final application is wireless communication from skin to device, using near field communication. A small chip is embedded into the tattoos and the circuits are built from gold leaf and can transmit to devices. This wireless transmission holds the most possibilities for the future but carries the stigma that a chip is attached to the user's skin in order to function.
DuoSkin is amazing not just for the technology but also the wide array of applications that have already been imagined by the team. DuoSkin won the SciFi No Longer award on March 22, 2017 from the SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards, for the "coolest scientific achievement or discovery that before 2015 was only possible in science fiction." A heavily detailed paper presented at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers is available on the DuoSkin project website.
(Images courtesy the MIT Media Lab)