Highly stretchable, self-healing, adhesive, 3D-printable and antibacterial double-network hydrogels for multifunctional wearable sensors.

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Conductive hydrogels based on sodium alginate (SA) have potential applications in human activity monitoring and personal medical diagnosis due to their good conductivity and flexibility. However, most sensing SA-hydrogels exhibit poor mechanical properties and lack of self-healing, self-adhesive, and antibacterial properties, greatly limiting their practical applications. Therefore, in this paper, a multifunctional double-network PAA-SA hydrogel consisting of poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) and sodium alginate (SA) was prepared by a simple strategy. As a rigid network structure, SA endowed the hydrogel double network structure with excellent mechanical performance. As a wearable sensor, the PAA-SA hydrogel exhibited excellent tensile properties (strain: 1799.2 %), self-healing, high sensitivity (GF = 9.9), reliable repeatability, self-adhesive, 3D printability and antibacterial activity. Additionally, the highly sensitive wearing sensing PAA-SA hydrogel could accurately and real-time monitor various intense or subtle human movements, such as joint bending, face and throat vibration. Moreover, PAA-SA hydrogels were not only used for handwritten recognition of Arabic numerals and English letters, but also for real-time sensing of temperature changes and monitoring of human sweating. The prepared multifunctional wearable sensing hydrogel has the advantages of simple and versatile methods and low cost, making it a promising candidate for applications in different fields such as electronic skin, soft robotics, and medical monitoring.