Friday, April 11, 2014

Conductive tattoos


There is a new trend called "wearables", which means technology that is worn as clothes. Some sensors can now be embedded into clothes and they monitor your heart rate and skin conductance which relates to anxiety. Other wearables are buttons and displays that are sewn into clothes, and will hopefully make cellphones obsolete, i.e. everything will be in your clothes.

I want to suggest an even more radical wearable, i.e. the conductive tattoo. Recently a new form of designing electronic circuits has been introduced, namely, conductive ink. With this contraption, you can simply draw a circuit and make it work. You can draw whatever circuit you wish, augmented with some electronic devices, e.g. LED and batteries, and you simply have a working circuit.

What will happen if you make a conductive tattoo? Suddenly, your body acts as the circuit and you can connect your wearables whichever way you like. You can close a circuit by simply contorting your body, moving your hand, touching your ear, etc. More elaborate circuits require more elaborate tattoos, but hey, after Prison Break, that's probably very popular.

There are two main concerns with this project. The first is the toxicity of the conductive tattoo. While regular tattoo are also not that safe, putting in them conductive materials is probably not that healthy. One should first come up with a bio-compatible conductive ink. The second is the extra electronic that you actually need to make the circuit run, e.g. batteries. However, these can be worn on the body, e.g. wrist bands, and the rest of the tattoo closes the circuit.


I agree that this idea doesn’t make much efficiency-sense, but wouldn't it be cool to see a tattooed contortionist make a body-electrical-display?

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