If the ShatterShield screens on the DROID Turbo 2, Moto Z Force and Moto Z2 Force have disappointed you not in the way they don’t shatter, but in the way that they scratch extremely easily, Motorola may have a way to fix that.

The company has been awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office — the full text of which is linked below the story — of a screen made out of a “shape memory polymer” that can be easily repaired by the user with a few taps and a little heat.

The hardware involves, among microcomponents, a “smart device” screen’s top layer made out of the polymer, resistive heating ducts invisible to the user’s eyes, a breakage detector and a touch panel.

If a smart device user were to break its screen, they would go into an app, tap on the canvas to mark certain points to create a lasso around the breakage (or, perhaps, repair the whole screen as needed) and then activate the repair process. Heat would stimulate the shape memory polymer into transforming back into its original shape. Users are not to touch the display — there are certain fail-safes that would trip if that were to happen.

The process is not guaranteed to repair every crack and it is certainly not going to be able to work with pieces of the glass chipped out of the panel, but it should do better to repair a display for no cash charge at all. We may finally have self-healing screen tech in our horizon.

So, how’s that Moto Z3 Force looking?