Artificial multimodal receptors based on ion relaxation dynamics

Feeling temperature and touch The range of receptors in our skin make it possible to sense when we are touching an object and also gives us a general sense of the temperature of that object. Achieving this in an artificial skin-like material has been a challenge because most of the approaches for sensing touch are themselves temperature sensitive. You et al. studied the ion relaxation dynamics in a conductive elastomeric film (see the Perspective by Liu). They show that the ion relaxation time can be used as a strain-insensitive intrinsic variable for detecting temperature and the capacitance can be used as a temperature-insensitive extrinsic variable for sensing the strain, thus decoupling the two so that their signals do not interfere with each other. Science , this issue p. 961 ; see also p. 910