Liquid Metal‐Based Organohydrogels for Wearable Flexible Electronics

Abstract

AbstractCurrently, developing organohydrogel‐based wearable flexible electronics (WFEs) has aroused intensive research interest, since they possess superior environmental stabilities than hydrogel‐based WFEs, but the development of organohydrogels is still in the infant stage. Herein, an efficient strategy is developed to achieve the fast preparation of organohydrogels by exploring the high reactivity of eutectic gallium–indium alloy in inducing radical polymerization, and constructing the glycerol/water binary solvent system. The obtained organohydrogels, named liquid metal‐based ion‐conducting organohydrogels (LMIOs), possess excellent environmental adaptability over a wide temperature range (−20 to 100 °C) and high transparency. With outstanding mechanical properties and self‐healing abilities, LMIOs can act as strain sensors, showing high sensing sensitivities in broad strain range (0.1–1000%) and fast response speed (<100 ms). Therefore, LMIOs perform well in sensing strains from human motions. Besides, LMIOs can be constructed on latex gloves and prosthetic fingers, forming an LMIO skin on their surfaces. The latex gloves equipped with the LMIO skin can accurately recognize the gesture changes of users. The LMIO skin on the prosthetic finger behaves like human skin, possessing the capability to detect the finger's movements and self‐healing ability. Hence, LMIOs present great prospects in skin‐attachable devices, robotics, and prosthetics.