Researchers on the College of Massachusetts Amherst’s division of biomedical engineering have give you an uncommon use for play-putty, store-bought or do-it-yourself: constructing “squishy bioelectronic circuits” that can be utilized as electrodes for electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), electromyography (EMG), and electrooculography (EOG) — measuring exercise within the mind, coronary heart, muscle groups, and eyes respectively.
“[Squishy circuits] are actually kid’s play putty, that can be conductive,” senior writer Dmitry Kireev, assistant professor of biomedical engineering on the College of Massachusetts, explains of the staff’s work. “We used the squishy circuits as an interface to measure electrical energy or measure bioelectrical potentials from a human physique.”
Youngsters’ play-putty, conductive because of its preserving salt, can kind “squishy circuits” for EMG, EOG, ECG, and EEG sensing. (📷: Katsoulakis et al)
Play-putty or play-dough is an easy, comfortable materials beloved by children worldwide — and it is easy to make, requiring solely flour, water, salt, cream of tartar, and slightly oil, plus elective meals coloring for aesthetics. The salt acts as a preservative to stop the dough from spoiling, but it surely does one thing else too: turns the dough conductive, permitting it to hold {an electrical} sign.
That is well-known, and salt-enriched dough has been used previously to construct easy comfortable circuits and capacitive touch-sensors as a method of getting youthful children concerned with electronics — however Kireev and colleagues have discovered the identical materials might have a broader utility, standing in for business electrodes in EEG, EMG, EOG, and ECG sensing functions — being comfortable and delicate, bio-compatible, and intensely low cost.
The dough electrodes carried out simply as nicely, or higher, than business gel electrodes for a variety of bio-sensing duties. (📷: Katsoulakis et al)
The latter is a selected promoting level to the squishy-circuit method: the place business electrodes value between $0.25 and $1 every, the dough variations value round $0.01 — even when utilizing business dough. The fabric will be molded to match the contours of the pores and skin, is self-healing, the electrodes can simply be repositioned and reused — and, in testing, carried out on-par with one business gel electrode and twice nearly as good as one other.
The staff’s work has been printed within the journal Machine beneath open-access phrases.