Silk fabric electronic skins (E-skins) enable a more natural and delicate interactive experience for smart devices. However, achieving precise structural design, interfacial stability, and skin-like functionality often requires intricate manufacturing processes and sophisticated equipment. Herein, a mass-produced, highly flexible texture-programmed silk fabric E-skin is developed by employing an advanced jacquard process coupled with a polyphenol coordination-mediated deposition strategy. The E-skin features broad strain-sensing capabilities, enabling it to monitor both light and heavy rhythmic vibration signals, facilitate information interaction via Morse code, and exhibit a fast response time of 60 ms. In addition, this E-skin possesses multimodal information sensing capabilities and can accurately identify objects with varying surface roughness (10-90 μm) and hardness (2.0 HA-42.7 HD). Notably, by utilizing machine learning algorithms, it can specifically differentiate between four fabrics that have the same raw materials and weaving density but differ in micron-scale circular structures (accuracy > 95%). Overall, the texture-programmed silk E-skin offers advanced multimodal sensing for health monitoring, motion tracking, and tactile sensing.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.