Stretchable Conductive Fabric Enabled By Surface Functionalization of Commercial Knitted Cloth

Flexible, stretchable multifunctional silver nanoparticles-decorated cotton textile based on amyloid-like protein aggregation for electrothermal and photothermal dual-driven wearable heater

The design of multifunctional, high-performance wearable heaters utilizing textile substrates has garnered increasing attention, particularly in the development of body temperature and health monitoring devices. However, fabricating these multifunctional wearable heaters while simultaneously ensuring flexibility, air permeability, Joule heating performance, electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding and antibacterial properties remains a significant challenge. This study utilizes phase transition lysozyme (PTL) film-mediated electroless deposition (ELD) technology to deposit silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) on the cotton fabrics surface in a mild aqueous solution at room temperature, thereby constructing a wearable heater with long-term stability, high conductivity, and exceptional photothermal properties. The textiles enriched with Ag NPs exhibit remarkable electrothermal and photothermal dual-driven heating capabilities, achieving temperatures exceeding 110 °C within 50s under 2 V, or in merely a few seconds through photothermal conversion. Importantly, these textiles retain the intrinsic flexibility and breathability of the textile substrate. Furthermore, the amyloid-like protein Ag NP integrated textiles demonstrate excellent antibacterial properties, and exhibit a high EMI shielding efficiency of 50 dB within the frequency range of 8.2-12.4 GHz. Therefore, these multifunctional Ag NPs wearable heaters were expected to find applications in areas such as smart wearable clothing and future health management.

Textile Electronics with Laser-Induced Graphene/Polymer Hybrid Fibers

The concept of wearables is rapidly evolving from flexible polymer-based devices to textile electronics. The reason for this shift is the ability of textiles to ensure close contact with the skin, resulting in comfortable, lightweight, and compact "always with you" sensors. We are contributing to this polymer-textile transition by introducing a novel and simple way of laser intermixing of graphene with synthetic fabrics to create wearable sensing platforms. Our hybrid materials exhibit high electrical conductivity (87.6 ± 36.2 Ω/sq) due to the laser reduction of graphene oxide and simultaneous laser-induced graphene formation on the surface of textiles. Furthermore, the composite created between graphene and nylon ensures the durability of our materials against sonication and washing with detergents. Both of these factors are essential for real-life applications, but what is especially useful is that our free-form composites could be used as-fabricated without encapsulation, which is typically required for conventional laser-scribed materials. We demonstrate the exceptional versatility of our new hybrid textiles by successfully recording muscle activity, heartbeat, and voice. We also show a gesture sensor and an electrothermal heater embedded within a single commercial glove. Additionally, the use of these textiles could be extended to personal protection equipment and smart clothes. We achieve this by implementing self-sterilization with light and laser-induced functionalization with silver nanoparticles, which results in multifunctional antibacterial textiles. Moreover, incorporating silver into such fabrics enables their use as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy sensors, allowing for the direct analysis of drugs and sweat components on the clothing itself. Our research offers valuable insights into simple and scalable processes of textile-based electronics, opening up new possibilities for paradigms like the Internet of Medical Things.

Skin-Friendly and Wearable Iontronic Touch Panel for Virtual-Real Handwriting Interaction

Touch panels are deemed as a critical platform for the future of human-computer interaction and metaverse. Recently, stretchable iontronic touch panels have attracted attention due to their superior adhesivity to the human body. However, such adhesion can not be named "real wearable", leading to discomfort for the wearer, such as rashes or itching with long-time wearing. Herein, a skin-friendly and wearable iontronic textile-based touch panel with highly touch-sensing resolution and deformation insensitivity is designed based on an in-suit growing strategy. This textile-based touch panel endows excellent interfacial hydrophilic and biocompatibility with human skin by overcoming the bottlenecks of the hydrogel-based uncomfortable sticky touch interface and low mechanical behavior. The developed touch panel enables handwriting interaction with good mechanical capacity (114 MPa), nearly 4145 times higher than pure hydrogel. More importantly, our touch panel possesses intrinsic insensitivity to wide external loading from the silver fiber (<0.003 g) to even heavy metal block (>10 kg). As proof of concept, the textile-based iontronic touch panel is applied to handwriting interaction, such as a flexible keyboard and wearable sketchpad. This iontronic touch panel with skin-friendly and wearable qualitities is helpful for next-generation wearable interaction electronics.

Toward a new generation of permeable skin electronics

Skin-mountable electronics are considered to be the future of the next generation of portable electronics, due to their softness and seamless integration with human skin. However, impermeable materials limit device comfort and reliability for long-term, continuous usage. The recent emergence of permeable skin-mountable electronics has attracted tremendous attention in the soft electronics field. Herein, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of permeable skin-mountable electronics. Typical porous materials and structures are first highlighted, followed by discussion of important device properties. Then, we review the latest representative applications of breathable skin-mountable electronics, such as bioelectrical sensors, temperature sensors, humidity and hydration sensors, strain and pressure sensors, and energy harvesting and storage devices. Finally, a conclusion and future directions for permeable skin electronics are provided.