Muscle-Inspired Self-Healing Hydrogels for Strain and Temperature Sensor.

By Gang Ge, Yao Lu, Xinyu Qu, Wen Zhao, Yanfang Ren, Wen-jun Wang, Qian Wang, Wei Huang, Xiaochen Dong. ACS Nano, 2019

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, self-healing hydrogel bioelectronic devices have raised enormous interest for its tissue-like mechanical compliance, desirable biocompatibility and tunable adhesiveness on bioartificial organs. However, the practical applications of these hydrogel-based sensors are generally limited by their poor fulfillment of stretchability and sensitivity, brittleness under subzero temperature and single sensory function. Inspired by the fiber-reinforced microstructures and mechano-transduction systems of human muscles, a self-healing (90.8%), long-lasting thermal tolerant and dual-sensory hydrogel-based sensor is proposed, with high gauge factor (18.28) within broad strain range (268.9%), low limit of detection (5% strain), satisfactory thermo sensation (-0.016 ℃-1) and highly discernable temperature resolution (2.7 ℃). Especially, by introducing glycerol/water binary solvent system, desirable subzero-temperature self-healing performance, high water-retaining and durable adhesion feature can be achieved, resulting from the ice crystallization inhibition and highly dynamic bonding. On account of the advantageous mechanoreception and thermosensitive capacities, a flexible touch keyboard for signature identification and a "fever indicator" for human forehead's temperature detection can be realized by this hydrogel bioelectronic device.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Organic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19e8b742aed7b66a3f4cee16ed82f0bf067a19a6