Ionic conductive hydrogels toughened by latex particles for strain sensors

Conductive hydrogels have attracted tremendous attention due to their excellent softness and stretchability as wearable strain sensing devices.However,most of hydrogel-based strain sensors suffered from poor self-recoverability and fatigue resistance,resulting in significant decrease of strain sensitivity after recycling.Here,a soft and flexible wearable strain sensor is prepared by using an ionic conductive hydrogel with latex particles as physical cross-linking centers.The dynamic physical cross-linking structure can effectively dissipate energy through disruption and reconstruction of molecular segments,thereby imparting excellent stretchability,self-recoverability and fatigue resistance.In addition,the hydrogel exhibits excellent strain-sensitive resistance changes,which enables it to be assembled as a wearable sensor to monitor human motions.As a result,the hydrogel strain sensor can provide precise feedback for a wide range of human activities,including large-scale joint bending and tiny phonating.Therefore,the tough ionic conductive hydrogel would be widely applied in electronic skin,medical monitoring and artificial intelligence.

An integrated portable bio-monitoring system based on tough hydrogels for comprehensive detection of physiological activities

Advanced soft ion-conducting hydrogels have been developed rapidly in the integrated portable health monitoring equipment due to their higher sensitivity,sensory traits,tunable conductivity,and stretchability for physiological activities and personal healthcare detection.However,traditional hydrogel conductors are normally susceptible to large deformation and strong mechanical stress,which leads to inferior electro-mechanical stability for real application scenarios.Herein,a strong ionically conductive hydrogel(poly(vinyl alcohol)-boric acid-glycerol/sodium alginate-calcium chloride/electrolyte ions(PBG/SC/EI))was designed by engineering the covalently and ionically crosslinked networks followed by the salting-out effect to further enhance the mechanical strength and ionic conductivity of the hydrogel.Owing to the collective effects of the energy-dissipation mechanism and salting-out effect,the designed PBG/SC/EI with excellent structural integrity and robustness exhibits exceptional mechanical properties(elongation at break for 559.1%and tensile strength of 869.4 kPa)and high ionic conductivity(1.618 S·m^(-1)).As such,the PBG/SC/EI strain sensor features high sensitivity(gauge factor=2.29),which can effectively monitor various kinds of human motions(joint motions,facial micro-expression,faint respiration,and voice recognition).Meanwhile,the hydrogel-based Zn||MnO_(2)battery delivers a high capacity of 267.2 mAh·g^(-1)and a maximal energy density of 356.8 Wh·kg^(-1)associated with good cycle performance of 71.8%capacity retention after 8000 cycles.Additionally,an integrated bio-monitoring system with the sensor and Zn||MnO_(2)battery can accurately identify diverse physiological activities in a real-time and non-invasive way.This work presents a feasible strategy for designing high-performance conductive hydrogels for highly-reliable integrated bio-monitoring systems with excellent practicability.

Self-sensing magnetic actuators of bilayer hydrogels

Hard magnetic soft robots have been widely used in biomedical engineering.In these applications,it is crucial to sense the movement of soft robots and their interaction with target objects.Here,we propose a strategy to fabricate a self-sensing bilayer actuator by combining magnetic and ionic conductive hydrogels.The magnetic hydrogel containing NdFeB particles exhibits rapid response to magnetic field and achieve bending deformation.Meanwhile,the polyacrylamide(PAAm)hydrogel with lithium chloride(LiCl)allows for the sensing of deformation.The bending behavior of the bilayer under magnetic field is well captured by theoretical and simulated models.Additionally,the bilayer strain sensor shows good sensitivity,stability and can endure a wide-range cyclic stretching(0-300%).These merits qualify the self-sensing actuator to monitor the motion signals,such as bending of fingers and grasping process of an intelligent gripper.When subject to an external magnetic field,the gripper can grab a cube and sense the resistance change simultaneously to detect the object size.This work may provide a versatile strategy to integrate actuating and self-sensing ability in soft robots.

Hydrogel-elastomer-based stretchable strain sensor fabricated by a simple projection lithography method

Stretchable strain sensor detects a wide range of strain variation and is therefore a key component in various applications.Unlike traditional ones made of elastomers doped with conductive components or fabricated with liquid conductors,ionically conductive hydrogel-based strain sensors remain conductive under large deformations and are biocompatible.However,dehydration is a challenging issue for the latter.Researchers have developed hydrogel-elastomer-based strain sensors where an elastomer matrix encapsulates a hydrogel circuit to prevent its dehydration.However,the reported multistep approaches are generally time-consuming.Our group recently reported a multimaterial 3D printing approach that enables fast fabrication of such sensors,yet requires a self-built digital-light-processing-based multimaterial 3D printer.Here,we report a simple projection lithography method to fabricate hydrogel-elastomer-based stretchable strain sensors within 5 minutes.This method only requires a UV projector/lamp with photomasks;the chemicals are commercially available;the protocols for preparing the polymer precursors are friendly to users without chemistry background.Moreover,the manufacturing flexibility allows users to readily pattern the sensor circuit and attach the sensor to a 3D printed soft pneumatic actuator to enable strain sensing on the latter.The proposed approach paves a simple and versatile way to fabricate hydrogel-elastomer-based stretchable strain sensors and flexible electronic devices.