An Electronic Skin with No External Power and Self-Healing Ability: Underwater Smart Equipment Enters a New Life-Like Stage

Keywords: self-healing electronic skin, magnetoelectric sensing system, underwater robots, diving safety, intelligent materials, flexible sensors, marine engineering

Introduction

As deep-sea exploration, diving operations and marine robot applications continue to expand, sensor reliability and durability are becoming key bottlenecks for underwater smart equipment. Traditional electronics can easily suffer performance loss or complete failure in wet, high-pressure and mechanically harsh environments; once damaged, they often cannot repair themselves, raising maintenance costs and creating potential safety risks for divers and equipment. Recently, a research team in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore's College of Design and Engineering developed a self-healing electronic skin, offering a brand-new solution to this problem.

This self-healing magnetoelectric sensing system, inspired by biological skin, can sense touch without external power, detect damage such as punctures, penetration and cuts, and automatically restore function after injury. Its significance goes beyond materials innovation; it pushes underwater electronics toward a new stage of "active sensing and automatic repair."

Biomimetic Design: Giving Electronics a Sense of "Pain"

The team drew inspiration from the structure and function of human skin to build a flexible electronic skin with a multi-layer structure. The outer layer is an elastic, rubber-like material that can stretch freely and also heal itself. Inside, a sensing network made of liquid metal and magnets handles signal transmission and response. The design effectively integrates the skin's surface protection and neural sensing system into one material platform, giving it behavior similar to biological tissue.

When the outer layer is punctured, penetrated or cut, the material inside creates a clear wave response, and the system can quickly recognize the change and turn it into a "pain-like" signal. This "damage triggers an alert" mechanism is highly valuable. For underwater equipment, many failures are not instantly fatal; they begin as tiny cracks or local deformation and gradually grow into full failure. If the system can identify abnormalities early and accurately, it can buy time for repair and reduce the chance of accidents.

Even more important, when the damaged surfaces touch again, the molecular structure in the material can reconnect and self-heal. This process needs no human intervention and does not rely on external power, showing strong environmental adaptability and self-recovery capability.

Performance Breakthrough: Stable Operation Underwater

The special nature of the underwater environment means electronic skin must face pressure, humidity, salt corrosion and mechanical wear all at once. Many traditional flexible sensors work well in air, but once submerged, their sensitivity and stability drop sharply and signal distortion can appear. A major highlight of this study is that even under full immersion, the skin continued to detect damage and achieved nearly 100% repair after 10 days.

Experimental results show the electronic skin recovered up to 92% of its elasticity after damage. That means it can not only "sense injury" but also recover structure well and support long service life. For diving gear and marine robots, this is especially important. Underwater missions are often long and environments are complex; if a sensor fails, the device may no longer accurately judge posture, route or contact status, affecting communication, navigation and operating precision.

From an engineering standpoint, the significance of this result is that sensors are no longer just "fragile electronic parts." They are becoming intelligent material systems that can adapt to harsh conditions and show life-like resilience. This change is expected to significantly extend the service life of diving equipment and marine robots while reducing maintenance frequency and replacement costs.

Applications: From Diving Gloves to Robots and Wearables

The team has already applied the prototype to smart diving gloves for wireless underwater communication and to robotic hands that perform underwater tasks. Test results show the devices perform well in both air and water, with strong sensitivity, quick response and durability. That means the system is no longer just a lab concept; it already has some capacity for real-world integration.

From a broader industry view, the technology has strong scalability. In the future, it could be used not only in underwater robots and diving equipment, but also in prosthetics, soft robots and smart wearables. For example, putting a similar structure into a prosthetic limb could improve tactile feedback and damage self-checking. In wearables, self-healing materials could reduce failure risk from daily wear. For robots, if the outer layer has skin-like sensing and repair abilities, they can safely enter unknown or high-risk environments to work.

Assistant Professor Chen Yujun of the National University of Singapore said that human pain is essentially a protective alarm that reminds a person to deal with injury in time. The team hopes to transfer this biological wisdom to underwater electronics so that machines also gain a closed loop of "sense danger - identify damage - start repair." The value of this idea is not only to improve performance, but also to push artificial systems toward a higher level of autonomy and adaptability.

Conclusion

This study, published in Advanced Materials, shows the huge potential unlocked by combining intelligent materials with biomimetic engineering. The arrival of self-healing electronic skin means underwater equipment no longer has to rely only on external maintenance to extend its life. Instead, it may one day sense damage on its own and repair itself, gradually becoming more life-like in how it operates. For deep-sea exploration, marine engineering and diving safety, this is not just a materials breakthrough, but a system-level innovation.

In the future, as flexible electronics, magnetoelectric sensing, self-healing materials and robotics continue to merge, intelligent machines with true skin-like sensing and recovery may move from the lab into the ocean, healthcare and everyday life. At that point, electronic devices will no longer be passive tools; they will become intelligent agents that can understand the environment, protect themselves and keep evolving.