Biomaterials for reliable wearable health monitoring: Applications in skin and eye integration.

Recent advancements in biomaterials have significantly impacted wearable health monitoring, creating opportunities for personalized and non-invasive health assessments. These developments address the growing demand for customized healthcare solutions. Durability is a critical factor for biomaterials in wearable applications, as they must withstand diverse wearing conditions effectively.

Spongy Ag Foam for Soft and Stretchable Strain Gauges.

Strain gauges, particularly for wearable sensing applications, require a high degree of stretchability, softness, sensitivity, selectivity, and linearity. They must also steer clear of challenges such as mechanical and electrical hysteresis, overshoot behavior, and slow response/recovery times. However, current strain gauges face challenges in satisfying all of these requirements at once due to the inevitable trade-offs between these properties.

Rapid Self-Healing Hydrogel with Ultralow Electrical Hysteresis for Wearable Sensing.

Self-healing hydrogels are in high demand for wearable sensing applications due to their remarkable deformability, high ionic and electrical conductivity, self-adhesiveness to human skin, as well as resilience to both mechanical and electrical damage. However, these hydrogels face challenges such as delayed healing times and unavoidable electrical hysteresis, which limit their practical effectiveness. Here, we introduce a self-healing hydrogel that exhibits exceptionally rapid healing with a recovery time of less than 0.

Wearable Sensor Patch with Hydrogel Microneedles for In Situ Analysis of Interstitial Fluid.

Continuous real-time monitoring of biomarkers in interstitial fluid is essential for tracking metabolic changes and facilitating the early detection and management of chronic diseases such as diabetes. However, developing minimally invasive sensors for the in situ analysis of interstitial fluid and addressing signal delays remain a challenge. Here, we introduce a wearable sensor patch incorporating hydrogel microneedles for rapid, minimally invasive collection of interstitial fluid from the skin while simultaneously measuring biomarker levels in situ.

In Situ Spray Polymerization of Conductive Polymers for Personalized E-textiles.

E-textiles, also known as electronic textiles, seamlessly merge wearable technology with fabrics, offering comfort and unobtrusiveness and establishing a crucial role in health monitoring systems. In this field, the integration of custom sensor designs with conductive polymers into various fabric types, especially in large areas, has presented significant challenges. Here, we present an innovative additive patterning method that utilizes a dual-regime spray system, eliminating the need for masks and allowing for the programmable inscription of sensor arrays onto consumer textiles.

Strong Thermopower Enhancement and Tunable Power Factor Semimetal to Semiconductor Transition in a Transition-Metal Dichalcogenide.

Electronic band engineering is a promising approach to enhance the thermopower of thermoelectric materials. In transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), this has so far only been achieved using their inherent semiconducting nature. Here, we report the thickness-modulated band engineering of nanosheets based on semimetallic platinum diselenide (PtSe) resulting in a thermopower enhancement of more than 50 times than that of the bulk.

Anomalous thermoelectricity of pure ZnO from 3D continuous ultrathin nanoshell structures.

ZnO is a potential thermoelectric material because of its non-toxicity, high thermal stability, and relatively high Seebeck coefficient (S) of metal oxides. However, the extremely low figure of merit (zT), which comes from a high thermal conductivity (κ) over 40 W m K, limits the thermoelectric application of ZnO. In particular, below 500 K, ZnO exhibits a nearly negligible zT (<10), unless a dopant is incorporated into the crystal structure.