Recent advances in soft functional materials have created a wealth of opportunities for the construction electronic tools with tissue-like mechanical properties. When integrated with natural biological tissues, these devices could enable advanced means for physiological sensing and delivery of therapeutic stimulation. However, biological organs usually involve dynamic 3D structures, which is difficult to interface with electronic devices manufactured with conventional planar processing techniques. Resolving this mismatch in form factors would require multi-disciplinary efforts in materials exploration, structural design and innovation in fabrication techniques.

This symposium will focus on the emerging approaches to addressing the challenge of 3D interfacing between soft electronic tools and complex biological organs and tissues. The expanding library of soft electronic materials has enabled active devices with shape-morphing capabilities. Inspirations from Nature and paper arts provided design guidelines for organ-conformal integration. Unconventional fabrication techniques allowed patterning and integration of materials components into sophisticated 3D devices. These and other methods span across a broad spectrum of materials science and device engineering, leading to electronic tools for bio-integration at multiple length scales. These devices could help to address many urgent demands in cardiac physiological investigation, neuroscience, tissue engineering and other areas in biomedicine. This symposium will also include discussions on long-term operation of devices, multiplexity of sensors, scalable manufacturing, data processing as well as other remaining challenges and future opportunities.

bioelectronic biomaterial biomedical biomimetic devices electronic material flexible hybrid stretchable