Stretchable conductive Janus hydrogel with controllable porous structures for high‐performance strain sensing

Abstract

A stretchable conductive Janus hydrogel with controllable porous structures is developed for highly sensitive monitoring of human motion. The Janus porous structure of the hydrogel is fabricated using patterned single‐layer droplets produced by microfluidics as pore‐forming templates. The hydrogel possess dual‐crosslinked polymeric networks to achieve good stretchability (480%), which allows fully cover the stretching range of human skin (usually <200%). Meanwhile, the hydrogel possess controllable Janus porous structures with local strain/stress enhancement to achieve high sensitivity (GF = 5.2) for strain‐sensing. The Janus hydrogel shows fast response for stretching (175 ms) and recovery (170 ms), and good durability (200 cycles at 50% strain). The conductive Janus hydrogel with high sensitivity and good mechanical properties are promising for developing soft wearable sensors in fields such as human health monitoring and human motion detection.

An adhesive, low swelling and conductive tri-network hydrogel for wearable electronic devices

“…In recent years, conductive hydrogels have been widely used as wearable electronic devices in the fields of human motion detection, 1-3 health monitoring, [4][5][6] electronic skin, [7][8][9] and so on. Conductive hydrogels combine conductive materials and soft hydrogels with good electrical conductivity, 10,11 porosity, and flexibility, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional wearable electronic device materials (such as metal yarn, polyethylene terephthalate, silica gel, glass fabrics, etc.…”