Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1153097
AUGUST 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 101 Pierobon: As an engineer, I enjoy doing re- search, and I like to learn new things. I learned most of the subjects in engineering school: C programming, UNIX, thermodynamics, mate- rial science, structural design, mechanical de- sign, hydrology, statistics, etc. It was just a matter of having the time, interest, experience, and background to fill in the rest. Customers ask me to write courses for them. If I know the subject, I will do it. For exam- ple, I was asked to write an online course on temperature sensors. I know thermodynamics and material science, so I did my research and came up with temperaturesensortraining.com. This particular course may also be of interest to some of your readers. Shaughnessy: You're quite a polyglot. Other than English, what languages do you teach in? Pierobon: Spanish and Portuguese. Students prefer to be taught in their mother tongue. As a matter of fact, the last time I taught C program- ming, it was in Spanish. I have taught techni- cal courses at the university level on six con- tinents. I am truly grateful to All Flex for their continued support. Shaughnessy: Thanks for your time. Pierobon: Thank you, Andy. FLEX007 The device described in the paper, a metal oxide semi- conductor on a polymer base, offers manufacturing ad- vantages and can be processed at temperatures lower than 300°C. "We report an ultrathin, mechanically imperceptible, and stretchable (human-machine interface) HMI device, which is worn on human skin to capture multiple physi - cal data and also on a robot to offer intelligent feedback, forming a closed-loop HMI," the researchers wrote. (Source: University of Houston) Researchers have reported the discovery of a multi- functional ultra-thin wearable electronic device that is imperceptible to the wearer. The device allows the wear- er to move naturally and is less noticeable than wearing a Band-Aid, said Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Profes- sor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston and lead author for the paper, published as the cover story in Science Advances. "Everything is very thin, just a few microns thick," said Yu, who also is a principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH. "You will not be able to feel it." It has the potential to work as a prosthetic skin for a ro - botic hand or other robotic devices, with a robust human- machine interface that allows it to automatically collect information and relay it back to the wearer. That has applications for health care (Yu asked, "What if when you shook hands with a robotic hand, it was able to instantly deduce physical condition?") as well as for situ - ations such as chemical spills, which are risky for humans but require human decision-making based on physical in- spection. While current devices are gaining in popularity, the re- searchers said they can be bulky to wear, offer slow re- sponse times and suffer a drop in performance over time. More flexible versions are unable to provide multiple func- tions at once—sensing, switching, stimulation and data storage, for example—and are generally expensive and complicated to manufacture. A Wearable Device So Thin and Soft You Won't Notice It