Hirsute wetsuit lets swimmers go with the flow

A WETSUIT made from a hairy artificial skin could enable competition swimmers to hone their front crawl or breaststroke. By making swimmers hypersensitive to the flow of water over their bodies, the idea is to allow them to modify their stroke to minimise the turbulent flows that slow them down.

Ryuta Okazaki and colleagues at the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo, Japan, have created a skin that mimics the way human hair follicles add to our skin's ability to detect sensation. Human skin has short, curly hairs sprouting out of sockets called follicles. Receptors deep in each follicle fire nerve signals when hairs bend - for instance, if air or water flows over or the skin is touched.

The UEC researchers attempted to magnify this process with an artificial skin that uses much longer hairs to produce a larger effect on our skin than tiny human hairs can manage. They implanted a thicket of about 100 plastic optical fibres, each around 9 centimetres long, into a 15-by-6 cm patch of transparent silicone rubber. Each fibre can swing in any direction and passes through the silicone to touch the real human skin beneath.

The way the fibres protrude a few millimetres through the silicone before they touch the skin makes them act as tiny levers, creating a greater shear force than is achieved by ordinary hairs. The skin was tested by attaching it to the arms of 14 volunteers. When they dunked their arms in flowing water, they reported "greater clarity of water surface perception", a haptics conference in Istanbul, Turkey, was told in June.

The team plan to try larger patches; but even if the device does not end up aiding swimmers, Steve Haake, a sports scientist at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, predicts a novel role for it: digital wetness. "I suspect its main use could be in virtual reality suits," he says.

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