Kumaran Thillainadarajah demonstrating Smart Skin to a group of high school students.
Kumaran Thillainadarajah is one of eight UNB students and a professor in a small startup company, with one idea that is about to break through: smart skin. After winning 60,000 dollars at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation competition and being chosen to participate in the CBC’s Dragons’ Den, he and his team are ready to go into the real world and sell their product.
“We’re the first people in the world doing this,” said Kumaran Thillainadarajah, creator of smart skin.
Smart skin is a material that is sensitive to touch because it’s made of carbon nanotubes that are conductive to electricity and that can measure the intensity of touch from a light stroke to a hard squeeze.
The students see their product as the next step in the video game industry because smart skin is closer to human skin, and it can make virtual interactions seem real.
Smart skin could be made to fit around a joystick, and when people play sports on the video game they could squeeze and have more functions. Smart skin could tell people if they’re playing tennis wrong, if they’re squeezing the racket too hard.
“This material is the key. Pressure sensors have been around for decades, but the difference between our pressure sensors and ordinary pressure censors is that our smart skin can go right where other materials can’t,”he said.
“A hundred thousand of those carbon nanotubes would fit on the head of a needle. That’s how small it is.”
Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical carbon molecules that are stronger than steel, but also flexible and soft, and they conduct more electricity than copper. These molecules are part of nanotechnology, a science that studies the matter of the smallest existing particles: atoms.
Smart skin started when Thillinadarajah and his professor Chibante were asked to make a glove for the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME), that was stronger and more resistant than the ones in the market. But they realized they could do much more with carbon nanotubes, because they could fit in pressure sensitive sensors into the glove.
The original idea was to apply smart skin to prosthetics, and to give people with amputated limbs a sense of touch, but the students are having a hard time translating the sense of touch from the machine – smart skin – to a human being’s brain.
“Prosthetics is a very small market, it’s something I really hope we can do, but that’s not going to be able to fund this whole operation,” Thillainadarajah said.
Besides the video game industry, students plan to sell smart skin to car companies and to the athletics industry. In cars, smart skin could be wrapped around the wheel, so that it can notice when the drivers are falling asleep and wake them up. For athletics, the idea is to create shoes that are sensitive to touch and that can help athletes practice. It can tell them what they’re doing wrong, if they’re pressing too hard, and it can teach them how to correct these mistakes.
The students came second at the UNB CIBC business plan competition last fall, and they have won the Atlantic Engineering Competition for innovative design and the social awareness award at the Canadian Engineering competition in the end of last year.
The students have recentely cashed in 60,000 dollars in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition for Best Presentation, Best Student Venture, and for the prize of Young Entrepreneur.
They will use the money to build their company, and they plan to be in the market by 2011.
Smart Skin is also going to CBC’s Dragons’ Den in the summer, which is a televised business competition that has entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of Canadian business experts. These business millionaires, or dragons, choose the best company and then fund their projects.
