Prosthetic hands today can register that something is touching them, but the person wearing the prosthesis still can’t feel it. Researchers at Aarhus University’s Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering have built a soft, lentil-sized sensor, described in Advanced Functional Materials, that generates its touch signal in a way that more closely resembles how human skin actually does it — a difference the team hopes could eventually let such sensors connect directly to the nervous system.
The sensor is made from a silicone-like material and fabricated in the university’s cleanroom. Inside, small chambers connect through a microscopic channel filled with salt water; when touch moves electrically charged particles through that fluid, it shifts the local electrical balance and produces a weak signal — a process that loosely echoes how biological sensory cells convert mechanical pressure into nerve impulses. Existing touch sensors can register pressure well enough, but they don’t generate a signal shaped the way the nervous system expects one, which is part of why that information currently stops short of the brain.
In its current prototype form, the sensor can detect light touch and even pick up a pulse from a blood vessel in the wrist. Mounted inside a soft prosthetic hand, it registers contact and produces a measurable signal. The catch is that a nerve cell needs roughly 20 millivolts to fire, so the sensor’s output will need to be substantially amplified before it could directly stimulate a nerve — a gap the team is now working to close.
Assistant Professor Rassoul Tabassian, who worked on the project, is careful to temper expectations about how closely the device mimics biology — a sensory cell, he says, is far too complex to copy one-to-one. The real novelty, in his view, lies elsewhere: what’s groundbreaking about the sensor isn’t the generation of a sensing signal itself, but how that signal gets generated in the first place. The team’s next steps are further laboratory testing, followed by animal studies and, eventually, human trials — a process Tabassian expects will take several more years.
Journal: Advanced Functional Materials
Article Title: Bio-Inspired Artificial Ionic Mechanoreceptor
DOI: 10.1002/adfm.77916
Publication Date: September 28, 2026
Source: EurekAlert