{"id":11261,"date":"2021-07-01T15:06:53","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T07:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/?p=11261"},"modified":"2025-09-29T15:08:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T07:08:50","slug":"searching-for-a-new-sensation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/2021\/07\/01\/searching-for-a-new-sensation\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for a New Sensation"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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More Than Skin Deep<\/span><\/h3>

At NUS, Assistant Professor Benjamin C. K. Tee leads the Sensor.AI Systems Labs at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2013, and was a Stanford Biodesign Global Innovation Fellow in 2014. The winner of the Singapore Young Scientist Award in 2016, he received the NRF Fellowship the following year, and in 2019 was recognised as the WEF Young Scientist of the Year. Asst Prof Tee has more than 10 patents to his name, and serves on the IEEE Electron Devices Society Flexible Electronics and Displays committee and the Materials Research Society Singapore Committee.<\/em><\/span>
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We have all been there: a momentary lapse of concentration that exposes your mobile phone to a damaging force of impact. The results, depending on the angle of contact, could range from an innocuous scratch to a cracked screen. What has never happened before, is discovering later that the damaged screen has magically fixed itself. Welcome to the world of Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Benjamin C. K. Tee, where the third law of science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke (that states: \u201cany sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic\u201d) is in full effect.<\/span><\/p>

Self-healing materials have made the news in recent years \u2014 including widely-publicised experiments in creating new kinds of more sustainable and resilient concrete \u2014 but this barely scratches the surface of their potential. In fact, what drives Asst Prof Tee is an abiding interest in emulating our skin\u2019s ability to feel and generally provide us with feedback about the environment.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

A powerful demonstration for this potential is in a video he uses and discusses often. In it, a man can be seen struggling to get out of a wheelchair, though there is nothing visibly wrong with him and it appears to be a demonstration for the cameras. After a brief struggle, the man fails to rise from his seated position, instead falling to the ground. Asst Prof Tee explains that the man has lost the ability to feel, meaning that he cannot even tell how much pressure he is exerting on the ground \u2014 which is why he falls. \u201cWe use our skin from the cradle to the grave\u2026What we are doing is looking into how skin works and then recreating that in artificial devices,\u201d says Asst Prof Tee, neatly summarising his most famous work to date. How famous exactly? Well, aside from being featured in prestigious journals such as\u00a0Nature Materials, Nature Electronics and Science Robotics<\/em>, the artificial skin that Asst Prof Tee and his team pioneered has been covered regionally by CNA and internationally by CNN and\u00a0The Wall Street Journal.<\/em>\u00a0There are a lot of dimensions to this innovation, ranging from self-healing materials to an artificial nervous system. Asst Prof Tee notes that these developments are truly on the cutting edge of what is practically possible with today\u2019s technology \u2014 and some of tomorrow\u2019s too. The team is hard at work refining their concepts, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, with news breaking in May this year on their new soft material that mimics our sense of touch called artificially innervated foam (AiFoam).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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What drives Asst Prof Tee is an abiding interest in emulating our skin\u2019s ability to feel and provide us with feedback about the environment. <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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FROM SCIENCE FICTION TO FACT<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>

Asst Prof Tee\u2019s own adventure in the area of engineering artificial skin began years ago, when he pioneered self-healing material while working on his PhD. Then again, the story perhaps goes back further. Thanks to all the media attention, we know that he was inspired by a pivotal scene in\u00a0Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>. The scene in question of course is tied to the film\u2019s shocking climax, when the hero Luke Skywalker loses his hand in a duel with the villainous Darth Vader. He receives a prosthetic replacement, which the film\u2019s creator George Lucas showed us allows him to feel, exactly as if the robotic limb was his own hand. Asst Prof Tee cites this as his eureka moment; he was seven at the time. He later realised that there was an opportunity there. \u201cWhen you lose your sense of touch, you essentially become numb\u2026and prosthetics users face that problem,\u201d he told journalists at CNA. \u201cSo by recreating an artificial version of the skin, they can hold a hand, and feel that\u00a0it is soft and warm. They can feel how hard they are holding that hand.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Continuing on the theme of turning science fiction into science fact, Asst Prof Tee explains that artificial skin can actually move into \u201csuperhuman\u201d territory, because it is not limited by biology. There is even a sustainability angle, which is where that example of the smartphone touchscreen comes into the picture. \u201cYour phone\u2019s touchscreen is essentially like an artificial skin,\u201d says Asst Prof Tee. \u201cIf we can engineer it to repair itself, we can cut down on electronic waste.\u201d This is a useful reminder that artificial skin and its related technologies that Asst Prof Tee is developing at NUS\u00a0cut across multiple disciplines, offering benefits to robotics, medicine and even consumer goods.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

In the example of prosthetics, the challenge remains how artificial skin connects with the human nervous system. Asst Prof Tee says that he and his team are riding the wave of improvements in neurotechnological interfaces to offer an advantage in terms of speed. For the record, the artificial skin developed by Asst Prof Tee is already capable of transmitting information more efficiently than anything in our own biology. The hurdle remains at the level of integrating all that potential with our nervous system, but that does not mean the artificial skin will not have an immediate practical impact. \u201cThink of it this way: we are now at the stage of the 56kbps dial-up modem,\u201d he says. \u201cIt will take maybe 10 years (for the human-machine interface), but we already have practical applications in robotics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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I want to see the research that I do have an impact in the world, and prosthetics was quite obvious.<\/span><\/h5>

Assistant Professor Benjamin C. K. Tee<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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ACING THE TOUCH TEST<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>

While some artificial skin applications, such as the self-healing mobile phone screen, remain fictional, Asst Prof Tee\u2019s work at NUS has made the news for its real-world applications. In the area of robotics, he and his team integrated an artificial nervous system with the electronic skin to enable a machine to perform what would be a simple task for a human \u2014 pick up a soft drink can. He tells us that this was done by linking the electronic skin to an emulated biological neural network, which runs on an energy-efficient neuromorphic Intel Loihi chip. Again, efficiency is one the hallmarks here, with the Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin (ACES) only needing one wire to send information to the processing system.\u00a0<\/span>

ACES is also more sensitive than human skin in some ways, transmitting information more than 1,000 times faster. For some context, it can identify shape, texture and hardness 10 times faster than the blink of a human eye. This is all possible thanks to the system being uninhibited by the limits of biology, as Asst Prof Tee alluded. In the published reports on this latest application of ACES, it is noted that robots previously relied only on visual senses to perform actions, with the application of pressure being programmed into the device. Asst Prof Tee and Asst Prof Harold Soh combined seeing and touching, pairing them to great effect with the neural network; both professors are members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC).<\/span>
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REACHING OUT TO CONNECT<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>

All of the different applications \u2014 both current and potential \u2014 illustrate why the multi-disciplinary approach in the sciences is so important. \u201cToday\u2019s types of problems are no longer well defined, because of the interconnectedness of technology,\u201d says Asst Prof Tee. \u201cI want to see the research that I do have an impact in the world, and prosthetics was quite obvious (in shaping how he bridged the gap between electrical engineering and the fields of biology and medicine<\/em>).\u201d\u00a0<\/span>

It is for this reason that Asst Prof Tee hopes more students will consider the broad range of engineering disciplines. Computer science may be the popular choice, but the world still needs specialists in materials science and electrical engineers too. Showcasing his keen concern for real-world application, Asst Prof Tee asserts that no matter what technology one develops in a particular field, one needs to rope in experts from other fields to realise the practical benefits. One thing is for certain: there are plenty more multidisciplinary innovations on the way from Asst Prof Tee and his team, as they strive to take the \u2018fiction\u2019 out of science fiction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Photos by Alvin Teo<\/h6>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assistant Professor Benjamin C. K. Tee from the NUS Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Institute for Health Innovation & Technology, regularly makes the news with his innovations \u2014 which range from self-healing electronic skin to a foam that emulates the human sense of touch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":11262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11261"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11287,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11261\/revisions\/11287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alumni.nus.edu.sg\/thealumnus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}