Recent research progress of relieving discomfort between electronics and human body involves serpentine designs, ultrathin films, and extraordinary properties of nanomaterials. However, these strategies addressed thus far each face own limitation for achieving desired form of electronic-skin applications. Evenly matched mechanical properties anywhere on the body and imperceptibility of electronics are two essentially required characteristics for future electronic-skin (E-skin) devices. Yet accomplishing these two main properties simultaneously is still very challenging. Hence, we propose a novel fabrication method to introduce kirigami approach to pattern a highly conductive and transparent electrode into diverse shapes of stretchable electronics with multivariable configurability for E-skin applications. These kirigami engineered patterns impart tunable elasticity to the electrodes, which can be designed to intentionally limit strain or grant ultrastretchability depending on applications over the range of 0 to over 400% tensile strain with strain-invariant electrical property and show excellent strain reversibility even after 10 000 cycles stretching while exhibiting high optical transparency (>80%). The versatility of this work is demonstrated by ultrastretchable transparent kirigami heater for personal thermal management and conformal transparent kirigami electrophysiology sensor for continuous health monitoring of human body conditions. Finally, by integrating E-skin sensors with quadrotor drones, we have successfully demonstrated human-machine-interface using our stretchable transparent kirigami electrodes.
Future electronics are expected to develop into wearable forms, and an adequate stretchability is required for the forthcoming wearable electronics considering various motions occurring in human body. Along with stretchability, transparency can increase both the functionality and esthetic features in future wearable electronics. In this study, we demonstrate, for the first time, a highly stretchable and transparent electromagnetic interference shielding layer for wearable electronic applications with silver nanowire percolation network on elastic poly(dimethylsiloxane) substrate. The proposed stretchable and transparent electromagnetic interference shielding layer shows a high electromagnetic wave shielding effectiveness even under a high tensile strain condition. It is expected for the silver nanowire percolation network-based electromagnetic interference shielding layer to be beyond the conventional electromagnetic interference shielding materials and to broaden its application range to various fields that require optical transparency or nonplanar surface environment, such as biological system, human skin, and wearable electronics.
State monitoring of the complex system needs a large number of sensors. Especially, studies in soft electronics aim to attain complete measurement of the body, mapping various stimulations like temperature, electrophysiological signals, and mechanical strains. However, conventional approach requires many sensor networks that cover the entire curvilinear surfaces of the target area. We introduce a new measuring system, a novel electronic skin integrated with a deep neural network that captures dynamic motions from a distance without creating a sensor network. The device detects minute deformations from the unique laser-induced crack structures. A single skin sensor decodes the complex motion of five finger motions in real-time, and the rapid situation learning (RSL) ensures stable operation regardless of its position on the wrist. The sensor is also capable of extracting gait motions from pelvis. This technology is expected to provide a turning point in health-monitoring, motion tracking, and soft robotics.
To add more functionalities and overcome the limitation in conventional soft robots, highly anisotropic soft actuators with color shifting function during actuation is demonstrated for the first time. The electrothermally operating soft actuators with installed transparent metal nanowire percolation network heater allow easy programming of their actuation direction and instantaneous visualization of temperature changes through color change. Due to the unique direction dependent coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch, the suggested actuator demonstrates a highly anisotropic and reversible behavior with very large bending curvature (2.5 cm −1 ) at considerably low temperature (≈40 °C) compared to the previously reported electrothermal soft actuators. The mild operating heat condition required for the maximum curvature enables the superior long-term stability during more than 10 000 operating cycles. Also, the optical transparency of the polymer bilayer and metal nanowire percolation network heater allow the incorporation of the thermochromic pigments to fabricate color-shifting actuators. As a proof-of-concept, various color-shifting biomimetic soft robots such as color-shifting blooming flower, fluttering butterfly, and color-shifting twining tendril are demonstrated. The developed color-shifting anisotropic soft actuator is expected to open new application fields and functionalities overcoming the limitation of current soft robots.Unlike the conventional rigid actuators, the soft actuators are composed of elastic and lightweight materials with simple operating systems. [1] Due to their unique soft features, the soft actuators have been utilized in bioapplications such as artificial muscles, [2,3] soft manipulators, [4,5] biomimicking robots, [6][7][8][9] prosthesis, [10] and so on. The soft actuators operates by various physical, chemical, and optical stimulus such as electricity, [11][12][13][14][15] heat, [16][17][18] light, [7,8,19] magnetism, [20] pressure, [21] and humidity. [9,18,[22][23][24] Among them, considering the practical uses, the electrical signal has been the most popular input signal due to its easy and intuitive control of actuators. Typically the approaches to establish electrically operated soft actuators can be divided into two categories which are using electroactive polymeric (EAP) materials [4,5,12,15,25,26] and thermal expansive materials. [16][17][18]24,[27][28][29] However, since the EAP-based actuators need high operating voltage [4,5] and electrolyte environment, [12,25,26] their application in various fields is limited. On the other hand, the electrothermal actuator (ETA) which basically operates by different thermal expansive volume changes between the polymers composing a bilayer requires much lower operating voltage and Color-Changing Soft ActuatorsThe ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.
Transparent and stretchable energy storage devices have attracted significant interest due to their potential to be applied to biocompatible and wearable electronics. Supercapacitors that use the reversible faradaic redox reaction of conducting polymer have a higher specific capacitance as compared with electrical double-layer capacitors. Typically, the conducting polymer electrode is fabricated through direct electropolymerization on the current collector. However, no research have been conducted on metal nanowires as current collectors for the direct electropolymerization, even though the metal nanowire network structure has proven to be superior as a transparent, flexible, and stretchable electrode platform because the conducting polymer’s redox potential for polymerization is higher than that of widely studied metal nanowires such as silver and copper. In this study, we demonstrated a highly transparent and stretchable supercapacitor by developing Ag/Au/Polypyrrole core-shell nanowire networks as electrode by coating the surface of Ag NWs with a thin layer of gold, which provide higher redox potential than the electropolymerizable monomer. The Ag/Au/Polypyrrole core-shell nanowire networks demonstrated superior mechanical stability under various mechanical bending and stretching. In addition, proposed supercapacitors showed fine optical transmittance together with fivefold improved areal capacitance compared to pristine Ag/Au core-shell nanowire mesh-based supercapacitors.
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