Magnetosensitive E-Skins for Interactive Devices

Electronic skins (e-skins) have established themselves as a versatile technology to restore or enhance human perception, and potentially enable softer robotics. So far, the focus has been mostly on reproducing the traditional functions associated with human skin, such as, temperature, pressure, and chemical detection. New developments have also introduced nonstandard sensing capabilities like magnetic field detection, to spawn the field of magnetosensitive e-skins. Adding a supplementary information channel-an electronic sixth sense-allows humans to utilize the surrounding magnetic fields as stimuli for touchless interactions. Due to their vectorial nature, these stimuli can be used to track motion and orientation in 3D, opening the door to various kinds of gestural control for interactive devices. This approach to tracking provides an alternative or complement to optic-based systems, which usually rely on cameras or infrared emitters, that cannot easily capture fine motion when objects are far from the source or the line-of-sight is obtruded. Here, the background, fabrication techniques, and recent advances of this field are reviewed; covering important aspects like: directional perception, geomagnetic field detection, on-site conditioning, and multimodal approaches. The aim is to give the reader a general perspective and highlight some new avenues of research, toward artificial magnetoception.