To enable this material to store electrical energy, two layers of woven fibres are made into a sandwich, separated by a thin layer of a glass-based insulating material.
They turned an electroactive polymer into an actuator so that the material could change to exert force with an electrical signal, basically creating an exomuscle.
This microscopic scale and sensitivity allows the sensor to map a high-resolution image of electrical charge that occurs over the surface of a source material (for example a human finger), when it makes contact with a thin insulating surface (ie a plastic surface).