Multichannel noninvasive human–machine interface via stretchable µm thick sEMG patches for robot manipulation

Epidermal electronics (e-skin) emerging in recent years offer the opportunity to noninvasively and wearably extract biosignals from human bodies. The conventional processes of e-skin based on standard microelectronic fabrication processes and a variety of transfer printing methods, nevertheless, unquestionably constrains the size of the devices, posing a serious challenge to collecting signals via skin, the largest organ in the human body. Herein we propose a multichannel noninvasive human-machine interface (HMI) using stretchable surface electromyography (sEMG) patches to realize a robot hand mimicking human gestures. Time-efficient processes are first developed to manufacture mu m thick large-scale stretchable devices. With micron thickness, the stretchable mu m thick sEMG patches show excellent conformability with human skin and consequently comparable electrical performance with conventional gel electrodes. Combined with the large-scale size, the multichannel noninvasive HMI via stretchable mu m thick sEMG patches successfully manipulates the robot hand with eight different gestures, whose precision is as high as conventional gel electrodes array.