PlasticARMPit: Accelerating the Development of Flexible Integrated Smart Systems

A flexible electronic nose, worn under the armpit and powered by a plastic neural network, will learn to recognise the chemical signature of body odour. Today’s flexible electronics—smart patches, wearable sensors, bendable displays—are held back by their processors. The microcontrollers available for flexible circuits are too slow and power-hungry for tasks like real-time odour recognition. The PlasticARMPit project replaces the general-purpose microcontroller with a custom-built digital neural network made from plastic transistors. Because the network is hard-wired for a single task and runs calculations in parallel, it can process sensor data quickly while sipping power. If the prototype works, it will demonstrate that plastic neural networks can serve as the standard processing engine for the entire field of printed electronics. That would unlock a generation of flexible smart systems—not just armpit patches, but also food spoilage sensors, wound infection monitors, and environmental gas detectors—that can analyse complex chemical mixtures without a rigid silicon chip. The project is a proof of concept for a fundamental shift in how flexible devices compute, moving from general-purpose to application-specific hardware.