LED Tattoos Will Make You Look Cool

Now this is crazy! Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics that are biodegradable circuits could enable better neural interfaces and LED tattoos. If they could somehow come up with a way to respond to touch or even mood…then we would be getting somewhere.  But imagine a tattoo that you could turn on and off…or even moves?!

” New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silk and silicon implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning the wearer’s skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolve away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about one millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick, and the sheet of silk will keep them in place, moulding to the shape of the skin when saline is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chip to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example. ”

Article source and read more: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/the-illustrated-man-how-led-tattoos-could-change-the-face-of-humanity/