Fiber-based electronics enabling lightweight and mechanically flexible/stretchable functions are desirable for numerous e-textile/e-skin optoelectronic applications. These wearable devices require ...low-cost manufacturing, high reliability, multifunctionality and long-term stability. Here, we report the preparation of representative classes of 3D-inorganic nanofiber network (FN) films by a blow-spinning technique, including semiconducting indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO) and copper oxide, as well as conducting indium-tin oxide and copper metal. Specifically, thin-film transistors based on IGZO FN exhibit negligible performance degradation after one thousand bending cycles and exceptional room-temperature gas sensing performance. Owing to their great stretchability, these metal oxide FNs can be laminated/embedded on/into elastomers, yielding multifunctional single-sensing resistors as well as fully monolithically integrated e-skin devices. These can detect and differentiate multiple stimuli including analytes, light, strain, pressure, temperature, humidity, body movement, and respiratory functions. All of these FN-based devices exhibit excellent sensitivity, response time, and detection limits, making them promising candidates for versatile wearable electronics.
Stretchable electronics outperform existing rigid and bulky electronics and benefit a wide range of species, including humans, machines, and robots, whose activities are associated with large ...mechanical deformation and strain. Due to the nonstretchable nature of most electronic materials, in particular semiconductors, stretchable electronics are mostly realized through the strategies of architectural engineering to accommodate mechanical stretching rather than imposing strain into the materials directly. On the other hand, recent development of stretchable electronics by creating them entirely from stretchable elastomeric electronic materials, i.e., rubbery electronics, suggests a feasible a venue. Rubbery electronics have gained increasing interest due to the unique advantages that they and their associated manufacturing technologies have offered. This work reviews the recent progress in developing rubbery electronics, including the crucial stretchable elastomeric materials of rubbery conductors, rubbery semiconductors, and rubbery dielectrics. Thereafter, various rubbery electronics such as rubbery transistors, integrated electronics, rubbery optoelectronic devices, and rubbery sensors are discussed.
Compared to conventional rigid and bulky electronics, stretchable electronics have substantial advantages for various situations where large mechanical deformations are required. Recent progress shows stretchable electronics from all rubber‐like components are excellent candidates to substitute electronics developed using architectural engineering for eliminating strain. The current development in rubbery electronics is reviewed and future directions for the field are suggested.
An accurate extraction of physiological and physical signals from human skin is crucial for health monitoring, disease prevention, and treatment. Recent advances in wearable bioelectronics directly ...embedded to the epidermal surface are a promising solution for future epidermal sensing. However, the existing wearable bioelectronics are susceptible to motion artifacts as they lack proper adhesion and conformal interfacing with the skin during motion. Here, we present ultra-conformal, customizable, and deformable drawn-on-skin electronics, which is robust to motion due to strong adhesion and ultra-conformality of the electronic inks drawn directly on skin. Electronic inks, including conductors, semiconductors, and dielectrics, are drawn on-demand in a freeform manner to develop devices, such as transistors, strain sensors, temperature sensors, heaters, skin hydration sensors, and electrophysiological sensors. Electrophysiological signal monitoring during motion shows drawn-on-skin electronics' immunity to motion artifacts. Additionally, electrical stimulation based on drawn-on-skin electronics demonstrates accelerated healing of skin wounds.
Soft robots outperform the conventional hard robots on significantly enhanced safety, adaptability, and complex motions. The development of fully soft robots, especially fully from smart soft ...materials to mimic soft animals, is still nascent. In addition, to date, existing soft robots cannot adapt themselves to the surrounding environment, i.e., sensing and adaptive motion or response, like animals. Here, compliant ultrathin sensing and actuating electronics innervated fully soft robots that can sense the environment and perform soft bodied crawling adaptively, mimicking an inchworm, are reported. The soft robots are constructed with actuators of open‐mesh shaped ultrathin deformable heaters, sensors of single‐crystal Si optoelectronic photodetectors, and thermally responsive artificial muscle of carbon‐black‐doped liquid‐crystal elastomer (LCE‐CB) nanocomposite. The results demonstrate that adaptive crawling locomotion can be realized through the conjugation of sensing and actuation, where the sensors sense the environment and actuators respond correspondingly to control the locomotion autonomously through regulating the deformation of LCE‐CB bimorphs and the locomotion of the robots. The strategy of innervating soft sensing and actuating electronics with artificial muscles paves the way for the development of smart autonomous soft robots.
A fully soft robot that contains no rigid components is developed with demonstrated capabilities in inchworm‐like locomotion. The fully soft robot is designed in the fashion of hybridization of artificial muscle of carbon‐black‐doped liquid‐crystal elastomer nanocomposite with soft sensors of ultrathin Si optoelectronic sensors and soft actuators from open‐mesh shaped thin resistive heaters.
A reversibly stretchable supercapacitor using buckled single‐walled carbon‐nanotube (SWNT) macrofilms as the electrodes is demonstrated. A controllable wavy geometry and an extremely high ...stretchability (up to 30%) is achieved utilizing poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) as an elastomeric substrate (see image). The stretchable supercapacitors exhibit very stable capacitance under cyclic stretching and releasing, with capacitance values comparable to that of a supercapacitor assembled with pristine SWNT films.
As a primary anticounterfeiting technology, most paper anticounterfeiting devices take advantage of photoresponsive behaviors of certain security materials or structures, thus featuring low-security ...threshold, which has been a critical global issue. To incorporate optoelectronic devices into existing anticounterfeiting technology suggests a feasible avenue to address this challenge. Here we report a high-performance organic light-emitting paper-based flexible anticounterfeiting (FAC) device with multiple stimuli-responsiveness, including light, electricity, and their combination. Without sacrificing the preexisted security information on the paper, we fabricate FAC device in a facile, low-cost yet high-fidelity fashion by integrating patterned electro-responsive and photo-responsive organic emitters onto paper substrates. By introducing optical microcavities, the FAC device shows considerable color shift upon different viewing angle and applied voltage, which is easily discernible by naked eyes. Notably, the FAC device is bendable, unclonable, and durable (a half-lifetime over 4000 hours at 100 cd m
).
Organic solar cells (OSCs), particularly made based on solution processing methods, have made significant progress over the past decades through the concurrent evolution of organic photovoltaic ...materials and device engineering. Recently, high power conversion efficiencies around 18% and over 16% have been demonstrated in both rigid and flexible OSCs, respectively. While most of the OSC research has centered on efficiency and cost, their emerging and potential usages in many critical applications, particularly in biomedical fields have been rising. In this mini-review, we will briefly discuss the high-performance organic photovoltaic materials and the representative flexible OSCs to give a scope on the recent rapid development of OSCs. Besides, we will review some progress on the applications of OSCs in biomedical devices and integrated systems. The potential challenges associated with integrating OSCs for biomedical devices will be put forward.
A general strategy to impart mechanical stretchability to stretchable electronics involves engineering materials into special architectures to accommodate or eliminate the mechanical strain in ...nonstretchable electronic materials while stretched. We introduce an all solution-processed type of electronics and sensors that are rubbery and intrinsically stretchable as an outcome from all the elastomeric materials in percolated composite formats with P3HT-NFs poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) nanofibrils and AuNP-AgNW (Au nanoparticles with conformally coated silver nanowires) in PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane). The fabricated thin-film transistors retain their electrical performances by more than 55% upon 50% stretching and exhibit one of the highest P3HT-based field-effect mobilities of 1.4 cm
/V∙s, owing to crystallinity improvement. Rubbery sensors, which include strain, pressure, and temperature sensors, show reliable sensing capabilities and are exploited as smart skins that enable gesture translation for sign language alphabet and haptic sensing for robotics to illustrate one of the applications of the sensors.
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