This New Hyper-Flexible Touchscreen Means Your Next Phone Could Bend and Stretch

Canadian researchers have invented a soft and flexible touch-sensitive material that could see you folding or rolling up your smartphone or tablet when you're not using it, or let us wear adaptive health sensors that conform to our bodies like an artificial skin. 

UBC

The team used hydrogel electrodes that are embedded in the silicone layers, which project an electric field above the sensor. In testing with the team's 5 cm x 5 cm (2 inch x 2 inch) prototype, the electrodes enabled the sensor to register a finger hovering a few centimetres above the material, to make a kind of virtual touch.

While the current prototype is only small, the researchers say it would be easy and affordable to fabricate larger sensors for bigger devices, or to make malleable touch sensors for considerably more expansive settings.

Looking further ahead, the researchers think the material could even make future robots safer for humans to be around, by covering them in a soft, yielding coating – not just as cushioning, but as a sensitive layer that would alert them to the presence of people.

"Currently, machines are kept separate from humans in the workplace because of the possibility that they could injure humans," says one of the team, John Madden.

"If a robot could detect our presence and be 'soft' enough that they don't damage us during an interaction, we can safely exchange tools with them, they can pick up objects without damaging them, and they can safely probe their environment."

The research is described in Science Advances