Another example of advanced technology, and it’s potential to be used against the people that it’s supposedly invented to help. The key points in this article are that the most usefull application s of this technology will be used in RFID Tracking, Biometric surveillance, and covert military use. In fact those will be the big spenders who will front the money to get their hands on this technology first, the Military/Industrial/Surveillance/Biomedical industry

A team of engineers today announced a discovery that could change the world of electronics forever. Called an “epidermal electronic system” (EES), it’s basically an electronic circuit mounted on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements of your body.

EES is a leap forward for wearable technologies, and has potential applications ranging from medical diagnostics to video game control and accelerated wound-healing. Engineers John Rogers and Todd Coleman developed EES to forego the hard and rigid electronic “wafer” format of traditional electronics in favor of a softer, more dynamic platform.

To accomplish this, their team brought together scientists from several labs to develop “filamentary serpentine” (threadlike and squiggly) circuitry. When this circuitry is mounted on a thin, rubber substrate with elastic properties similar to skin, the result is a flexible patch that can bend and twist, or expand and contract, all without affecting electronic performance.

How Will We Wear Our Second Skin?

So what can an EES really do for us? The short answer is: a lot. In the paper describing their new technology, published in this week’s issue of Science, the researchers illustrated the adaptability of their concept by demonstrating functionality in a wide array of electronic components, including biometric sensors(read: Surveillance), LEDs, transistors, radio frequency capacitors(RFID Tracking) , wireless antennas, and even conductive coils and solar cells for power.

Eroding the Distinction Between Machine and Human

This technology provides a huge conceptual advance in wedding the biological world to the cyber world in a manner that is very natural. In some sense, the boundary between the electronics world and the biological world is becoming increasingly amorphous. The ramifications of this are mind-blowing, to say the least.

“The blurring of electronics and biology is really the key point here,” said Northwestern University’s Yonggang Huang, with whom Rogers and Coleman collaborated. “All established forms of electronics are hard, rigid. Biology is soft, elastic. It’s two different worlds. This is a way to truly integrate them.”

Original Article Here