Dual-mode Electronic Skin with Integrated Tactile Sensing and Visualized Injury Warning.

Mimicking pressure sensing behavior of biological skins using electronic devices has profound implications for prosthetics and medicine. The developed electronic skins based on single response mode for pressure sensing suffer from the rapid decrease in sensitivity with the increase of pressure. Their highly sensitive range covers a narrow part of tolerable pressure range of human skin and have weak response to the injurious high pressures. Herein, inspired by a bioluminescent jellyfish, we develop an electronic skin with dual-mode response characteristic, which is able to quantify and map the static and dynamic pressures by combining electrical and optical responses. The electronic skin shows notable changes in capacitance in low pressure regime and can emit bright luminescence in high pressure regime, which respectively imitates the functions of the mechanoreceptors and nociceptors in biological skin, enabling it to sense gentle tactile and injurious pressure with the sensitivity up to 0.66 kPa-1 and 0.044 kPa-1, respectively. The complementary highly sensitive sensing ranges of the electronic skin realize a reliable perception to different levels of pressure, and its mechanical robust and stretchable properties may find a wide range of applications in intelligent robots.