Abstract
Current marine research primarily depends on weighty and invasive sensory equipment and telemetric network to understand the marine environment, including the diverse fauna it contains, as a function of animal behavior and size, as well as equipment longevity. To match animal morphology and activity within the surrounding marine environment, here we show a physically flexible and stretchable skin-like and waterproof autonomous multifunctional system, integrating Bluetooth, memory chip, and high performance physical sensors. The sensory tag is mounted on a swimming crab (Portunus pelagicus) and is capable of continuous logging of depth, temperature, and salinity within the harsh ocean environment. The fully packaged, ultra-lightweight (<2.4g in water), and compliant "Marine Skin" system does not have any wired connection enabling safe and weightless cutting-edge approach to monitor and assess marine life and the ecosystem's health to support conservation and management of marine ecosystems. Marine sensory tags: a non-invasive solutionA cost-effective multi-sensory tag system has been developed by integrating wireless communication, high performance physical sensors and conformal packaging for marine research. A collaborative team led by Prof Muhammad Hussain from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia designs a non-invasive, wireless, lightweight epidermal multisensory tag with long deployment lifetime for marine research applications. To show the non-invasive and lightweight features of the "Marine Skin" tags, they test their long term temperature, pressure, salinity and their cross-sensitivity on the crustaceans in Red Sea water for more than 20 days. The sensory tags can be tailored for a diversity of animals of irregular size and shape due to the non-invasiveness and conformality of the functional circuits and packaging materials. They enable cost-effective solutions for long term monitoring and measuring.