Scientists develop meta-learning electric skin technology for typing without keyboard, a first in the world

A group of researchers led by South Korean scientists recently unveiled the first meta-learning electric skin technology in the world. This has been alternatively called the “electronic skin” that makes typing without a keyboard possible.

According to The Korea Herald, the research was backed by the government, and the team is led by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s computing professor Jo Sung Ho, Seoul National University’s mechanical engineering professor Ko Seung Hwan, and Stanford University’s chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao.

The country’s Ministry of Science and ICT said on Wednesday, Dec. 28, that the scientists developed a “spray-on smart skin.” In this project, they sprayed electrically-sensitive liquid on the skin at the back of the hand to print electrically-sensitive nanometers-thick-mesh that stretches from the forearm to the back of the hand.

In a study that was published in Nature Electronics, it was explained that this mesh creates electric signals as the hand’s movements propel the mesh to stretch or shrink. The electric signals will then be received by a Bluetooth module attached to the end of the mesh on the forearm. The collected information is then wirelessly transmitted to the computer.

During the test, the researchers allowed the computer’s artificial intelligence (AI) to learn the different movements of the hand. After a trial for certain movements, the scientists confirmed that different works could be done in the virtual space through the process.

One of the things that they could do is type on a computer with using only some hand movements. There is no keyboard and it was accomplished just after spraying the spray-on smart skin. This was possible as the AI learned how the hands and fingers moved when a person typed words on the keyboard.

“This study is the first case that combines the technologies of electric skin and cutting-edge artificial intelligence,” professors Jo Sung Ho and Ko Seung Hwan jointly said in a statement. “Both the newly developed hardware and software increased the user convenience to bring technological innovation in the fields of the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, remote treatment, and robot engineering in the future.”

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