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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Imagine navigating a virtual reality with contact lenses or operating your smartphone under water: This and more could soon be a reality thanks to innovative e-skins. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed an electronic skin that detects and precisely tracks magnetic fields with a single global sensor. This artificial skin is not only light, transparent and permeable, but also mimics the interactions of real skin and the brain, as the team reports in the journal Nature Communications (doi:/10.1038/s41467-025-56805-x).
Originally developed for robotics, e-skins imitate the properties of real skin. They can give robots a sense of touch or replace lost senses in humans. Some can even detect chemical substances or magnetic fields. But the technology also has its limits. Highly functional e-skins are often impractical because they rely on extensive electronics and large batteries. “Previous technologies have used numerous individual sensors and transistors to localize sources of a magnetic field, similar to touch sensors in a smartphone display. Our idea was to develop a more energy-efficient system that is more akin to our soft human skin and thus better suited for humans,” says Denys Makarov from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research at HZDR.
Lighter, more flexible, smarter
The researchers therefore replaced rigid, bulky substrates that usually host electronics with a thin, light, and flexible membrane that is just a few micrometers thick. The entire membrane is optically transparent and perforated, making the artificial skin permeable to air and moisture, allowing the real skin underneath to breathe.
However, such an ultra-thin membrane can accommodate a limited amount of electronic components. This is why novel e-skins feature a magnetosensitive functional layer, which acts as a global sensor surface to precisely localize the origin of magnetic signals. Since magnetic fields alter the electrical resistance of the material, a central analysis unit is able to calculate the signal location based on these changes. This not only emulates the functioning of real skin but also saves energy.
Artificial skin for a near-human sensory experience
“Such large-area magnetosensitive smart skins are a novelty,” says Pavlo Makushko, PhD student at HZDR and first author of the study. “Conceptually, e-skins now work more like the human body. No matter where I touch real skin, the signal always travels though nerves to the brain, which processes the signal and registers the point of contact. Our e-skins also have a single global sensor surface – just like our skin. And one single central processing unit reconstructs the signal – just like our brain.
This is made possible by tomography, a method that is also used for medical MRI or CT scans. It reconstructs the position of a signal from a large number of individual images. This technology is new for e-skins with magnetic field sensors – it was previously considered too insensitive for a low signal contrast of conventional magnetosensitive materials. The fact that we validated this method experimentally is a major technical achievement of the work, as Makushko emphasizes.
Experiencing our environment through magnetism
The new e-skins seamlessly track signal paths, enabling applications that recognize digital patterns, written by a magnetic stylus, touchless interactions in virtual reality, or operating a smartphone in extreme environments, even when diving. Often, the wearer of a magnetoreceptive artificial skin is not a human, but a machine.
At the same time, magnetic field sensors are less susceptible to interferences than conventional electronics. Robotic systems could use them to detect movements, even in complex environments where other methods fail. In winter, users could operate a smartphone equipped with optically transparent magnetic sensors via a magnetic patch on the fingertip of a glove with no interference from third-party electronics. Magnetoreception does not act as a compass, but offers a unique communication channel between humans and machines.
Dr. Denys Makarov | Head of Intelligent Materials and Systems
HZDR Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research
Phone: +49 351 260 3273 | Email: d.makarov[at]hzdr.de
P. Makushko, J. Ge, G. S. Cañón Bermúdez, O. Volkov, Y. Zabila, S. Avdoshenko, R. Illing, L. Ionov, M. Kaltenbrunner, J. Fassbender, R. Xu, D. Makarov: Scalable magnetoreceptive e-skin for energy-efficient high-resolution interaction towards undisturbed extended reality, in Nature Communications, 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56805-x)
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