Scientists at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, have designed a device that simulates the response of the human body to pain.
This technology can detect stress by emulating pain-like reactions and even learn over time. Dubbed the neuromorphic device, it has a potential leap in health monitoring and could even upgrade human-machine interaction, making machines more intuitive and responsive to human engagement.
Inspired by the Human Pain Response System
The human body has a highly complex pain perception system, which includes specialized sensors called nociceptors that detect harmful stimuli and send signals to the brain. This system allows us to respond rapidly to danger and learn over time to habituate to repeated stimuli. In other words, our bodies become less sensitive to pain after repeated exposure, which helps us adapt to chronic stressors.
Inspire the adaptive behaviour through this biological mechanism; researchers from JNCASR have built an equivalent device which reproduces that very adaptivity. It involves the silver-wire network infused within a stretchable material. While stretching that material creates minute gaps within the silver network, electric flow gets disconnected at that small stretch. A way to connect again at these sites has been by using an electric pulse in this gadget. Remarkably, every time this occurs, the device “remembers” the occurrence and adjusts its response correspondingly. This dynamic response pattern is akin to how humans respond to repeated pain over time.
A Step Toward Intelligent Materials
Unlike any traditional sensors, this device has the ability to adapt and “learn” through repeated strain. Instead of complex external systems or even complicated setups, it integrates both sensing and adaptive response into one flexible unit. It does not just detect the strain but responds and adjusts through experience, which makes it highly efficient and a very natural way for technology to respond to its environment.
“The device’s ability to heal the gaps and adjust its response with each stretch is similar to how the human body processes pain and adapts over time,” said the research team. “This technology could pave the way for future smart wearable systems that can detect and monitor stress levels in real-time.”
This innovation has great potential applications, especially in healthcare and robotics. Stress is a contributing factor to most chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and more. Creating wearable devices that can sense and adapt to stress in real-time would be a breakthrough in managing stress. It could help doctors monitor stress levels more effectively and provide immediate feedback for better patient care.
More importantly, the technology may be a game-changer for robotics. The device’s adaptive response to strain may make robots more intuitive and safer to work with humans. It could make machines “feel” their environment and adjust to it, which will enhance the way machines interact with people in healthcare, manufacturing, and many other fields.
A Simple, Yet Powerful Technology
Perhaps its most prominent aspect is simplicity: whereas many other sensors need multiple, cumbersome settings and an entire set of extraneous sensors, this combines it all in a single flexible unit. Being both a sensor and an adjustor in real-time, this technology is revolutionary, one step forward toward materials and systems that know how to interact intelligently with their environment.
This, in turn, could lead to next-generation health monitoring systems and wearable technologies that are efficient but also much more intuitive and natural. It will be a major breakthrough in the materials science field as a whole, and there is still a whole lot to be explored in terms of the potential applications.
The research, published in the journal Materials Horizons by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), marks a significant achievement in the field of neuromorphic engineering. The device’s ability to mimic pain perception and adapt its response paves the way for future innovations in smart materials, health monitoring systems, and human-machine interfaces.
Such advancements in wearable technology would open up unprecedented possibilities for wearable devices that can feel the complex dynamic needs of a human body even better and become more responsive to it. As such, this research at JNCASR may be opening up a whole new era for smart materials which could learn like never before and adapt to unprecedented conditions.
In summary, this device developed by JNCASR’s researchers is one giant leap closer to the creation of more intelligent, adaptive, and responsive technologies. By mimicking the body’s pain response and mechanisms of memory, it opens doors to advanced health monitoring systems and safer, even more intuitive robotic systems, ushering in a new era of innovation in healthcare and beyond.
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