Benjamin Tee has always been a Star Wars fan. A scene that fascinates him is the one in which Luke Skywalker receives a new prosthetic arm. When a robot pokes it, he feels real pain. As it turns out, Tee is working on something that could help bring the robotic arm to reality: electronic skin, or e-skin.
It’s a new field that’s preoccupied with creating a material that mimics the features of real skin, including the ability to sense the environment, to flex and stretch, and to self-heal. A PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University, the Singaporean is part of a team that’s on the bleeding edge of the e-skin movement.
While there are many teams around the world working on it, Tee’s is the first to develop e-skin that self-heals at room temperature, is sensitive to different pressures, conducts electricity, and is flexible at the same time. It’s probably the closest artificial thing to real skin at the moment.
Tee represents the best and brightest that Singapore has to offer. He spent 11 years in the United States as a scholar with government research agency A*STAR, first at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as an undergrad in electrical engineering, then at Stanford University as a graduate student.
“[Michigan’s weather] was a bit cold and I wanted a place that was a bit warmer and more startup-friendly, as I really wanted to do startups. I only applied to Stanford as my grad school. Most people applied to 10 schools. I applied for just one, and got in,” he says.
Through Stanford, he networked with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and did a product development internship at Amazon’s Lab 126, the R&D center that developed the Kindle. He even brought two startups – based on the technology he developed at Stanford – into incubators while in the US, but gave those up and left them in “capable hands” as he returned to Singapore. He is still working on the e-skin project as a Singapore-Stanford Biodesign fellow.
For his research work, he recently became one of the ten regional finalists for the annual MIT Technology Review magazine’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list.
Tee’s team has produced lab-scale prototypes. They’re now looking for licensing opportunities to take the technology to factory-scale production. If a partner can be found, this can be achieved within two years with a couple of million of dollars in investment to build a factory.
If the commercialization succeeds, the impact of Tee’s research could go beyond creating better prosthetics that mimic real limbs. It might enable touchscreens that sense different pressures, batteries that are four times more efficient than the Lithium-ion ones used in smartphones, and a method of measuring brain pressure without needing to “put a giant stick into someone’s head,” says Tee.
Whether or not these use cases could survive market competition is another matter, of course. Apple Watch, which already comes with a pressure-sensitive touchscreen, will launch in 2015. Meanwhile, battery tech is a hot research area with many competing solutions.
Nonetheless, what Tee proposes is interesting. His material consists of silicon, which can hold more electricity than the carbon used in current batteries. The problem though is that silicon cracks easily. That’s where the e-skin’s self-healing nature comes in – the mending counteracts silicon’s brittle nature.
Multitasker
As time-consuming as the research on this wonder material is, Tee actually has another project he’s working on, this time in a totally unrelated field. His team has created a device that provides relief to the symptoms that hemorrhoids sufferers endure. Also known as piles, it’s a condition that affects as much as 70 percent of people at some point in their lives.
The device is designed to be disposable and used at home, overcoming the embarrassment that many patients feel when facing a consultation with doctors. The startup, called Privi, recently won a $100,000 (US$75,000) grant in a competition held by health insurance firm NTUC Income, beating 200 teams.
The product’s patent is still pending, which means Tee can’t talk much about it at this stage. The company is raising more money for clinical trials and mass production, and it hopes to launch the device to the market by 2017.
Tying both Tee’s endeavors together is his love for science and using it to benefit society, as cliche as it sounds. He says:
“I’m very interested in healthcare. Everyone has to interact with the healthcare system, and I want to make an impact. I’ve built devices like smartphones, but I’m not so interested in that. I want to actually help people. I mean, you can help them play games or improve their health.”
See more: This sleep-tracking medical device is so good it’s being tested by Japan’s astronauts
This post Singapore inventor wants to solve tech and health problems with electronic skin appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Singapore inventor wants to solve tech and health problems with electronic skin
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