Wearable artificial graphene throat WAGT

The publication title alone is an eye-catcher: “A Wearable Skinlike Ultra-Sensitive Artificial Graphene Throat.”   Engineers at Tsinghua University, Beijing, describe “. . . a laser-scribed graphene on a thin sheet of polyvinyl alcohol film. The flexible device measured 0.6 by 1.2 inches, or about double the size of a person’s thumbnail. The researchers used water to attach the film to the skin over a volunteer’s throat and connected it with electrodes to a small armband that contained a circuit board, microcomputer, power amplifier and decoder. When the volunteer noiselessly imitated the throat motions of speech, the instrument converted these movements into emitted sounds, such as the words “OK” and “No.”  MORE

Image Credit: Adapted from ACS Nano 2019, 10.1021/acsnano.9b03218 and Tsinghua University