A group of PhD students from the MIT Media Lab and researchers from Microsoft Research have come up with the ultimate wearable: a temporary “smart” tattoo called “DuoSkin.”
The technology, which is described on MIT’s website and will be presented in full at a wearables symposium next month, is called DuoSkin.
The researchers say you can design a circuit using any graphic software, stamp out the tattoo in gold leaf (which is conductive to electricity), and then apply other commodity materials and components that would make the tattoo interactive.
MIT Media Lab already demonstrated their capability in three different ways.
First, they can be used for input to control mobile devices and computers, transforming your skin into a trackpad, a button or a slider.
They can also be used to turn your skin into a display of sorts, changing colors based on your body temp.
Finally, they can store data that phones and other NFC-enabled devices can read.