(Invited) Exploring the Easy, Cost-Effective Fabrications of Multifunctional on-Skin Wearable Bioelectronic Devices

Abstract

As compared to conventional, rigid, bulky physiological monitoring tools, emerging on-skin wearable bioelectronic devices are ultrathin, lightweight, and small footprint and can find wide applications in point-of-care diagnostics because of their easy deployment outside hospital settings. At present, on-skin wearables are usually fabricated by patterning conventional inorganic materials, novel organic materials, or emerging nanomaterials on flexible supporting substrates. Consequently, the state-of-the-art on-skin wearables often suffer from expensive precursor materials, costly fabrication facilities, complex fabrication processes, and limited functionalities and disposability. By using widely accessible pencils and papers as the fabrication tools, we have developed a rich variety of cost-effective, disposable on-skin bioelectronic devices, ranging from biophysical sensors (e.g., temperature sensors, electrophysiological sensors) and sweat biochemical sensors (pH sensors, uric acid sensors) to thermal stimulators, humidity energy harvesters, and transdermal drug delivery systems. The enabled devices can find wide applications in point-of-care diagnostics, particularly in low-resource environments owing to their low-cost resources, handy operation, time-saving fabrication, and abundant potential designs. In addition, with laser-assisted patterning of conductive and semiconductive materials on flexible substrates, the maskless, scalable fabrications of on-skin wearable bioelectronic devices can be achieved.