Abstract
Cutting-edge technologies of stretchable, skin-mountable, and wearable electronics have attracted tremendous attention recently due to their very wide applications and promising performances. One direction of particular interest is to investigate novel properties in stretchable electronics by exploring multifunctional materials. Here, we report an integrated strain sensing system that is highly stretchable, rehealable, fully recyclable, and reconfigurable. This system consists of dynamic covalent thermoset polyimine as the moldable substrate and encapsulation, eutectic liquid metal alloy as the strain sensing unit and interconnects, and off-the-shelf chip components for measuring and magnifying functions. The device can be attached on different parts of the human body for accurately monitoring joint motion and respiration. Such a strain sensing system provides a reliable, economical, and ecofriendly solution to wearable technologies, with wide applications in health care, prosthetics, robotics, and biomedical devices.
Highlights
Soft and stretchable integrated electronic systems show superior mechanical compliance and deformability and can be applied in unusual places that are not possible for conventional rigid electronics, such as bioinspired imagers [1,2,3], biointegrated electronics for diagnosis and drug delivery [4,5,6,7,8], and electronic skins for health monitoring and virtual reality [9,10,11,12,13]
To achieve electronic performances comparable to the established semiconductor devices, off-the-shelf chip components were integrated with soft, stretchable substrates through mechanical designs that can effectively shield strains in brittle electronic components from the soft substrates experiencing large deformation [14,15,16,17,18]
In order to avoid surgical removal of medical implants, to protect security of hardware and data, or to reduce electronic waste [44,45,46], transient, degradable, and recyclable electronic systems were developed by using materials that can be physically eliminated within a specified period of time [13, 47,48,49,50,51]
Summary
Soft and stretchable integrated electronic systems show superior mechanical compliance and deformability and can be applied in unusual places that are not possible for conventional rigid electronics, such as bioinspired imagers [1,2,3], biointegrated electronics for diagnosis and drug delivery [4,5,6,7,8], and electronic skins for health monitoring and virtual reality [9,10,11,12,13]. By utilizing the superior properties of liquid metal and dynamic covalent thermoset polyimine, we here introduce a high-performance integrated strain sensing system that is highly stretchable, rehealable, recyclable, and reconfigurable. These properties promise a cheap, robust, reliable, customizable, and sustainable wearable device, with positive impacts on economics, health care, and environment This device consists of polyimine as the moldable substrate and encapsulation, eutectic liquid metal alloy as the strain sensing unit and interconnects, and off-the-shelf chip components for measuring and magnifying functions. Unlike a conventional rotary encoder strain sensor [59], such wearable devices are beneficial for health monitoring, due to their soft and stretchable characteristics This device can be rehealed when it is damaged and can be fully recycled at room temperature and provides a reliable, economical, and ecofriendly solution to wearable technologies. We will present our work on device design, mechanical properties, rehealing and recycling of the strain sensor, characterization of strain sensing, and application of the strain sensor on joint motion and respiration monitoring
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