Living Layers
What is Living Layers?
This research project is a result from the “Bio-based Fabrication for Sustainable Interactive Systems” seminar at my university. It explores growing, assembly, and evaluation of a sustainable modular e-skin prototype. Our work was published at TEI’25, and the code is available on GitHub.
More on the project
Since the paper was published at a conference, I had to follow to a page limit and a one-column layout. This led to the decision to strip content that I consider important, even if minimal. For those interested, you can access the original, unadjusted version here.
A few words from me
Over a course of ~six months a lot a of blood, sweat & tears ;) went into this project. It was my first time experiencing research first hand, but nonetheless one of the best experiences I’ve had during my time at university. Starting out, publishing a paper was never the goal. But damn, pushing through ended up being an unexpected and simply amazing decision. I’m happy for the support given by my lectures (Madalina & Jürgen), thankful that Tobias was my group partner during the seminar and grateful that my girlfriend was always there to motivate me whenever I’ve wanted to stop (looking at you, temperature sensor). For some, this might not seem as much, but to me it is a small milestone that, with a 99% certainty, paved the way I want to go in the future. This allowed me to visit my first conference TEI’25, present work of mine infront of an amazing audience and to explore the beautiful city of Bordeaux.
During seminar we were initially allowed to choose between multiple topics with one of them being meta-materials and the other bio-materials/plastics. While meta-materials cought my attention from the start, I was quite intrigued and at the same time a little appalled by bio-materials (especially bacterial cellulose). The idea of combining both topics came up quickly anyway, having a structure made from meta-materials that mimics living movement with sensing capabilities that are given through e-skin sounded interesting. Doing both would have ended up breaking the scope, this meant for us: it’s time to make kombucha!
You may ask: kombucha? Thats correct, bacterial cellulose is a by-product of the fermentation process in kombucha, produced by the bacteria in the SCOBY. At first glance, especially when it’s still wet, bacterial cellulose can be quite repelling. Looking back, though, one thing I can say for sure is that it’s a material with amazing physical properties and exciting opportunities for integration into existing artifacts as well as for the development of new systems.
My contributions
- Bio-material Preparation: Cultivated kombucha, dried it, and prepared sheets for e-skin fabrication.
- Sensors & Hardware: Designed, built, and tested the touch matrix, humidity and temperature sensors (building on well-established concepts); designed voltage dividers and a Wheatstone bridge.
- Software: Wrote firmware for sensor data reading and evaluation (C++, Python and R).
- Final assembly: Put everything together into the functional e-skin prototype.
Abstract
Due to its flexibility and sensitivity, e-skin is increasingly used in applications in fields such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), biomedical engineering, and robotics. However, current e-skin technologies face challenges related to durability, self-healing, and sustainability. Addressing these issues, sustainable materials offer promising alternatives with unique physical properties. In this context, we explore how the inherent characteristics of biomaterials, such as bacterial cellulose, can be utilized for the development of e-skin. We demonstrate the design and use of bacterial cellulose as an e-skin by multilayer assembly, sensor development, and sensor integration into the material.