While there are many different elements that do the job, nothing helps the human cause more than our ability to grow on a consistent basis. You see, when someone manages to get better under all situations, they eventually steer themselves towards some huge milestones along the way. The same is proven by everything we have achieved so far, and yet the testimony that stands out pretty comfortably here is the one of a creation called technology. Right from the get-go, technology has been a clear anomaly, and mind you, the reason behind that is much bigger than just its unique skill-set. For instance, it also revolves a great deal around the manner in which the creation used those skills to impact an entire spectrum, including a highly-critical healthcare sector. Technology’s link-up with healthcare deserves a special shoutout, as it came at a time when the sector was really struggling against an outright obsolete structure. Fortunately, by conceiving new and smarter ideas, the creation was successful in shaking up the stated picture. In fact, even after getting there, it will continue to scale things up, and one example of that comes from a UCLA development.
The engineering team at University of California Los Angeles has successfully created artificial muscles, which can be useful in robotic prostheses, medical soft robots, and wearable devices. According to certain reports, the device is constructed from an acrylic dielectric elastomer, an electroactive polymer that can change its shape or size when stimulated using electricity. However, to use the said component, these researchers first had to address a major issue of limited flexibility that has been in the equation since the very beginning. They, in their response, would solve the conundrum by using a UV curing process and tweaking the crosslinking between polymer chains within the material to make it more flexible. As a result, they were able to achieve a sheet size of around 35 microns. The team has already tested the new device at length, and if available details are to be believed, they observed that the material can even generate more force than natural muscles. Talk about flexibility in specific, it notably displayed three to ten times more flexibility.
“Creating an artificial muscle to enable work and detect force and touch has been one of the grand challenges of science and engineering,” said Qibing Pei, a researcher involved in the study. “This flexible, versatile and efficient actuator could open the gates for artificial muscles in new generations of robots, or in sensors and wearable tech that can more accurately mimic or even improve humanlike motion and capabilities,”
