The skin we're in

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can depend on. or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com slash guarantee for details. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Many of us, most of us, are used to getting notifications on our phones and smartwatches all day long. Pings, vibrations that we quickly learn to ignore. But what if your device communicated to you in a completely different way? This device kind of more feels like a person reaching out. And you can imagine it like a smartwatch. This is researcher Katherine Kuchenbecker. In her lab, she works at the forefront of haptics, inventing ways to add a sense of touch to our technology, making it feel more responsive, tactile, maybe even alive.

1:43A smart watch, so just like a rectangle that's three centimeters by three centimeters, like one inch by one inch about. And when we send it a command, it will extend and go down and touch your skin. So imagine I reach over and just gently touch your arm. It's soft, so it feels very pleasant. It can touch you, make contact, and then it can press harder. And it can also vibrate. It can make all kinds of different signals on your skin. Can I, just to sort of understand it more, I'm picturing wearing like an Apple watch, but maybe it pokes me some of the hours. Maybe it touches me and presses down gently some of the other hours.

2:26Maybe it does the regular vibration other hours. But this could be useful to me in that I ignore touch when it becomes habitual. Indeed. So just like you choose which alarm you want to use to wake up in the morning, you could choose how do you want your devices to notify you that it's time to stand up. So I have a few people in my team who live far away from their partner. And maybe this is creepy, but maybe you could send not just a little buzz, but like a pat or eventually a caress or a congratulatory one, like a high five that comes in over your chat. Or I don't know, maybe something else. A hug.

3:09What would a hug feel like if my wristband could give me a digital hug? I'm picturing you call the grandparents on Zoom, but you also have a place where kids can put their hand and they can hold hands with their grandparents who are half a world away. Indeed, that's a personal connection to supplement or augment video chat. is definitely one thing. You could have like a zone on your phone or on a touchscreen where you could feel some haptic signals. You could kiss someone on the screen. One could. I haven't, we haven't prototyped that or tested it yet. I mean, I'm sure people will try all kinds of things.

3:52Is it fair to say that despite the fact that we have touch screens, we actually use that sense, that sense of touch far less than maybe we did before the digital age. I mean, I'm just thinking about all the hours I spend looking at a screen, touching nothing, taking it all in with my eyes and ears. That's a very insightful comment. And so touchscreens feel our touch. They vibrate, and that's good for getting your attention or telling you something happened. But touch has so many other facets and those dimensions are really all missing from the interactions that we have. Is that problematic? Do you feel that in the last two decades or so that's become more of an issue for people that they are less, well, I suppose disembodied in some way because they're using the sense of touch less in their daily lives?

4:48I do. Touch is, I would argue, our most important sense and also the most unappreciated because we have it so consistently. We can rely on it every day. In some ways, it is us. It's our body. Touch often grounds us to reality. It lets you know, let me reach out and pinch myself or touch this thing. Am I here? Where am I? What is real? What is not? So when virtual worlds don't have anything you can feel or screens feel my sensation and show me different materials, but I can't actually feel a digital representation of those materials, that's a disconnect and something that we are working to improve on.

5:31Through touch and temperature, your skin is constantly taking in signals from inside and outside your body in a uniquely personal way. And yet, our skin is the most public part of the body too. It's always on display. How do we use our body's largest organ to interpret the world? And how does the world use it to interpret us? Well, today on the show, the skin we're in. From cutting edge technology to personal journeys of self-acceptance. Ideas about the role our skin plays in our lives now and how technology may change it. So back to Katherine Kuchenbecker. Today, she's a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany.

6:23But her work on haptics started about 25 years ago as a Ph.D. student. I really started getting interested in touch when I started working on my Ph.D. with my advisor, Gunter Niemeyer, at Stanford. And he had helped invent the DaVinci surgical robot, which allows surgeons to remote control these long, thin instruments that reach inside of patients and do minimally invasive surgery. and he posed this problem of how can we let the surgeon who's controlling this robot feel what the surgeon is touching across the room because we both intuitively had this feeling that making surgeons do operations without being able to feel is going to make it more difficult so when the surgeon is moving his or her hands and is touching things if they don't feel anything let's say they're pulling on a suture to try to tighten a knot.

7:14If they can't feel how tight they're tying that knot, just like if you were trying to tie your shoes but your hands are numb, you may accidentally not tighten it tight enough. Or you might pull too hard and tear the suture in the patient's skin. Or you might bump into something and not realize that you hurt it or damaged the tissue. So Catherine and the team started thinking beyond push and pull and considering all the other messages that the skin takes in through touch. Your sense of touch is actually much broader than only forces. You can also feel where something is touching you on your skin.

7:51You can feel temperature getting warmer, colder. You can feel vibrations. So similar to how your ears can hear, can hear fast vibrations, your skin can actually feel vibrations up to 1000 hertz or 1000 cycles in a second. And that's much faster. You can only move your hand back and forth, like maybe one or two or three times in a second. But if you take two objects and you hit them together, they cause vibrations that you can feel and that signal to your brain, oh, you hit something, stop, or that was a little violent, or you hit the end of the rope. When a scalpel cuts through tissue or a needle pushes through the skin, there's a vibration between the two materials.

8:33The researchers realized that they could measure those vibrations and then simulate them with motors, making virtual surgery feel real. We could have a source of really rich, interesting information, and then we could very easily play these signals for the surgeons. Their right hand could feel the vibrations of the right instrument, and the left tool could feel the vibrations of the left instrument, and it's almost like their fingers were on the instruments themselves. The tool is only used for teaching surgeons how to operate. It's not actually used on humans. But Catherine says it speeds up the training process immensely.

9:10The cool thing is it feels very natural. They don't have to learn some like artificial touch language. They didn't have to do any extra learning. They just immediately start operating, moving much more like an expert, like being more careful and more precise and not being so violent because once you can feel, you can automatically correct for accidents or collisions that are a little more violent. Or if you were supposed to hit something and you missed it, you didn't quite get it, then you feel that. So again, we're able to let the surgeon or the person learning how to be a surgeon close the loop and feel the consequences of the motion so that they can move more precisely.

9:49These days, Catherine and her PhD students are developing all kinds of haptic technology, making touchscreens that feel textured, creating virtual reality gloves that make it possible to feel what you see, and building robots like HuggyBot. It was motivating. My PhD student at the time, Alexis Block, she and I were both living far from our families and wishing, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if we could just, like, when you're having a bad day, just like your mom or your dad could send you a hug, or maybe you want to send your sister or your brother or your kid a hug to give them some support, like that physical, warm, soft embrace that often just helps calm you down and know you're not alone.

10:36So we had the idea of creating a hugging robot, and it was named Huggybot eventually. In a video done at the lab, you can see a robot wearing a purple sweatshirt with a screen for a head, smiling and asking, can I have a hug, please? Their arms outstretched. Most robots in the world are not things you would ever want to hug. Many of them are pretty dangerous and you should stay far away from them because they could actually really severely hurt you. And even robots that are maybe safe to be around people, they usually have hard outer surfaces and they're cold and that makes them not very pleasant.

11:17So Huggybot is soft and warm and responds to how you touch it. We found out it's really important first that the robot let go of you when you're ready to end the hug. No one likes a robot or a person who hugs too long. Creepy. Yeah, definitely creepy. We even did that in the study. We had the robot hold on five seconds too long to prove that it's really important that the robot can feel when to let go. But then we realized there was this whole other level of the language of an embrace where if your partner squeezes you, it's nice to squeeze back. Or if they pat you, maybe you rub them on the back.

11:56Like there's a call and response, like a communication in this touch interaction. And so then we worked on giving Huggybot a sense of touch that would let it feel these intra-hug gestures, what the person it was hugging was doing. And so So we custom made it. It's an inflated torso, kind of like a beach toy. And inside, we put a pressure sensor that can measure the air pressure inside of Huggy Bot. Because when you squeeze it, that pressure goes up. But then we also added a microphone. And these two sensors are just in there listening inside of Huggy Bot's body. And then it can feel and hear through the microphone when you pat it or you rub it.

12:40their characteristic sounds, the haptic contraction on the robot's back, that we can figure, measure those things. And we can in real time, so we have little windows of data. We have a little machine learning algorithm that figures out with pretty high reliability, oh, that was a pat, that was a squeeze, that was a rub, or the user didn't do anything. So to give the robot some understanding of what's happening to its body during the embrace. When we come back, how humans reacted when Huggybot gave them a big embrace. On the show today, the skin we're in. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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15:19It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the skin we're in. And we've been talking to Katherine Kuchenbecker. She is an expert in haptics, how we can interact with our technology through touch, from our smartphones to robots like Huggybot. A robot built by Catherine and her PhD student to, yes, hug people. Huggybot knows when to embrace. It knows when to let go. It can pat, rub, and squeeze. But do people actually like being hugged by a robot? We had people try the robot. And this is why experiments are really important. We guess that if they patted the robot, they would want the robot to pat.

16:05Or if they did nothing, they would want the robot to do nothing. But that's actually not at all what we found. First of all, if people did something to the robot, like padded it and it did nothing, they did not like that. They thought that was a very rude robot that was kind of dissing them or ignoring them. So it was very important that the robot would respond. The second important thing was when people were just standing there hugging the robot and it spontaneously padded them or squeezed them or rubbed them, they really liked it. They liked it. They liked it. People really loved it, especially when the robot would squeeze them.

16:40It made people feel like this robot loves me. This robot cares about me. And of course, you know, it's just a robot, but it evokes this like, oh, wow, I feel supported. And so we actually then programmed HuggyBot that when there's periods of silence in the embrace, like nothing's happening, the robot will proactively squeeze you. So, you know, it's thinking about you. And people really, people really like this, but it's still important to let go when the person wants to let go. When the person lets go, robot always lets go. It feels like we're at this point where we are developing, some people are developing relationships with artificial intelligence, which is still based on vision, text, or also more artificial voices talking.

17:23But the next chapter of that seems to be communication based on our skin, our sense of touch, and the emotion that can be imparted with that. But then I think also people will worry that we think that we can substitute real human touch with this new kind of technology. It definitely comes up. Actually, we were surprised. We did a later study that's not published where we compared hugging our robot with hugging a real human. And in some ways, people preferred hugging the robot, although it doesn't feel as comfortable. They didn't have to worry about whether the woman we'd hired to give hugs was enjoying hugging them.

18:08They could hug the robot as long as they wanted to. So it's just like a one-sided interaction and you don't have to stress about, is this woman who's been hired to hug me, is she really enjoying this hug as much as I am? A sense of touch that delivers an emotion to you without any expectation of returning an emotion. Yeah. I mean, we are absolutely not trying to replace humans. Like a hug from someone you know and care about is going to always be, I think, better than a hug from any robot. But here we were comparing to hugging a stranger or like a friendly person who you don't know. I mean, we actually had already stressed out the people and then they knew that her job was there to give you hugs.

18:49But my job as a researcher, our job is to ask questions, figure things out, be honest about what we find and report them so that other scientists can read about that, learn from what we learned about and figure out what to do going forward. to adapt technology to help people, to help society. That was Katherine Kuchenbecker. She's a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, where she leads the haptic intelligence team. You can see her talk at TED.com. On the show today, the skin we're in. And now a different angle on touch and technology. We want to turn to the idea of artificial skin.

19:33technology being developed to mimic this all-important organ. This research is in its very early days, because replicating the sensations that our skin sends to our brain is extremely difficult. So the skin is a complex system where there are a lot of things that are actually all working together at the same time. This is Anna Maria Coclita. She is a materials scientist who spent the last decade trying to replicate skin. The actual idea of creating artificial skin isn't new. It's been around since the 1980s, often used for burn victims. But there is something missing from today's artificial skin.

20:19There is the possibility to reconstruct the skin, more or less, that it kind of looks similar to before the burn. but still the sensation is lost. The warmth of your coffee cup in the morning, water running through your hands as you wash them, or all the different textures you touch, smooth, rough, soft, or sharp. All of those sensations are captured by your skin's receptors. We have receptors that are for strong touch, light touch that is for the temperature. We have millions of receptors. And all day long, those millions of receptors are bombarded with all kinds of information. And then they transmit this information through electrical stimuli to the brain, thanks to the nerves, nerve connections.

21:14So it's a very complex system. And because the skin is so complex, replicating all those sensations has been really difficult until now. This is a piece of skin, of artificial skin. Here's Anna Maria Coklita on the TED stage, where she unveiled smart skin. We have, for the first time, produced an artificial skin that can respond to three stimuli. Touch, so force, temperature, and humidity. And it can do this also at an unprecedented resolution. So it's a very tiny device and so this means that it can sense objects that are actually smaller than the objects that can be sensed with our skin. So first of all, imagine burns victims.

22:13If the burn is very deep, this burns up until the lower level of the epidermis and this makes patients lose sensation. If one could make completely artificial skin, then this artificial skin could be applied as a patch in the area where there is the burn and give back the sensation to the people who have lost it. So let's talk about what you're doing in your lab. If I came into your lab and you showed it to me, what would I see? This artificial skin is actually thinner than the cross section of a hair. So it's basically impossible to see and impossible to really feel it when you touch it. So it takes the properties and the characteristics of the support material.

23:12So if we deposited on top of a glove, it will look like a glove. We have even deposited on top of these transferable tattoos, you know, the type that kids use. And then what you see is just really the tattoo paper. So it's so tiny that you don't see it and you don't feel it, but it takes the shape of the support material. The artificial skin is made of a bunch of nanoscopic cylinders. This is the architecture of the artificial skin. So we are really able to control the sickness and the chemical composition of a material at an atomic level. The inner core of each cylinder is filled with a polymer that gets bigger when exposed to a stimuli.

24:04Like touch, temperature, and humidity. And the outer part of the cylinder is made of something called piezoelectric material. A piezoelectric material is a material that, when it is compressed, produces electricity. So when the cylinder is touched or exposed to heat, for example, the polymer on the inside kind of puffs up and compresses the material on the outside. And boom. This produces an electric current. From there. Each of these cylinders could be connected to a series of electrodes. And then we measure the electricity at each of these locations. And similar to how our own skin sends information about what it's feeling to our brains?

24:51The artificial skin sends information to a computer. And that's where we read this electric signal. But then, you know, this signal can also be transmitted wirelessly to, for example, a neuroprosthetic. And this is how we actually intend to transmit it to the brain. But that will be a future development. You mentioned prosthetics. How would smart skin be an added value, I guess, or be important to someone who needs to wear a prosthetic? Yeah, so with this type of artificial skin, when this would be added to a prosthesis, we could produce electrical signals that could send directly the information, could either stimulate the rest of the arm or of the leg, or they could transmit the information to a neuroprosthesis in the brain and then help the patient recognize also the characteristics of the objects.

26:02So if they had a prosthetic foot, they would know if they were walking on hot gravel or... Yes, exactly. So a prosthetic hand, for example, would feel if the patient is holding a hot cup or a cold bottle of beer and would feel the difference. Another interesting field of application would be robotics. Nowadays, humanoid robots are used in many fields, for example, in medicine, but also in household. And these robots are exposed to several stimuli, several interactions with the environment and with the humans. And sometimes they have too many inputs at the same time. And this is the reason number one for robot failure.

26:55So imagine a future where actually a robot could be a bit more sensitive, a bit smarter. This would lead also to a higher safety of this technology. I mean, would that be, this sounds kind of like science fiction, but in the future that you have a burn and you just put on like a temporary tattoo over that part and it connects to your body? Something like that, yes. It could be a temporary tattoo or a patch that can be applied on the body, and then there could be a different way of detecting the electrical signals. It could be even that it is just connected to an app on the smartphone, and then maybe the app is, I don't know, sending a message, a warning, a sound, if the temperature goes above a certain level.

27:47There could be different options. In terms of the drawbacks to this, I can only imagine this is expensive? Well, yes and no, actually. In the sense that the instruments to deposit these materials are expensive at the beginning, but then the amount of material that is produced is so tiny that when you do a calculation per centimeter squared, the price is not that high. Oh, interesting. Okay, so this could be something that is accessible to people. Yes, that's where we would like really to keep it accessible to people. It's a challenge. And therefore, it's an interesting project, you know, from the scientific point of view, from the technological point of view.

28:37And yeah, this is what keeps me going. That's Anna Maria Coklita. She's a material scientist and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Bari in Italy. You can see her full talk at TED.com. So that's the tech side of skin and touch. But let's talk about the human side. We all want to feel good in our own skin. But for those of us who appear on camera, the pressure to look a certain way can also feel intense. Yes. It's a very cosmetic business. It's not just voice, it's a picture as well. And you do have to be presentable, what my mom used to say. You have to be presentable.

29:24This is Lee Thomas. I am an anchor and entertainment reporter, and I've been broadcasting on television since 1991. Woo! Yep. Long time. Yeah. From a very young age, Lee had always dreamt about being on TV. Where I came from, my example of television was this little boy named Rodney Allen Rippey. Hi, I'm Rodney Allen Rippey. He had a commercial back in the 70s. Pass with the kids, crank up the car, do you jack in the boat? He was a little black dude, and I said, hey, I can do that. I can talk on TV. Lee Thomas joins us now with some helpful hints. By his mid-20s, that dream was coming true. Yeah.