The Biomedical Polymers Research Group at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), developed ultrastretchable, highly transparent, self-adhesive, and 3D-printable ionically conductive hydrogels for multimode tactical sensing. The study was published in Chemistry of Materials (Chem. Mater.).

"Ionic skin" is a flexible electronic device that can mimic natural skin to sense external multiple stimuli, such as stress, temperature and humidity, via a biomimetic ion-conductive mechanism. It shows great potential in future healthcare/biomedical applications. As the most promising candidate to fabricate next-generation intelligent “ionic skin”, ionic hydrogels have drawn great attention from researchers. However, relatively poor comprehensive performance of conventional ionic hydrogels restricted their future development and practical applications.

Researchers at NIMTE developed an ionically conductive hydrogel-based electronic technology by introducing charge-rich polyzwitterions into a natural polysaccharide network.

The synthesized hydrogel showed ultrahigh stretchability (975%), excellent optical transmittance (96.2%), and universal conformal adhesion with different substrates. In addition, it realized dual stress/temperature sensation with high sensitivity.

By virtue of a facile 3D printing method, a prototype of sensor arrays was fabricated for multimode tactical sensing, which can comprehensively assess bioactivities of the human body in real time.

The study shed light on various promising applications of tactical sensing in the areas of motion capture, physiological and psychological health assessment, as well as human-machine interface. 

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (N0s. 51803227, 22007090, 51873222, and 52111530128), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Nos. LQ19E030006 and LQ19E030010), the S&T Innovation 2025 Major Special Program of Ningbo (Nos. 2019B10063 and 2020Z091), the CAS President’s International Fellowship for Visiting Scientists (2019VBA0016), etc.

Fig. Ionic hydrogel developed for multimode tactical sensing (Image by NIMTE)

Contact
CHEN Jing
Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering
E-mail: jing.chen@nimte.ac.cn