Healable, Stretchable and Flexible Bioelectronics

The ability of certain materials to regenerate after damage has attracted a great deal of attention since the ancient times. For instance, self-healing concretes, able to resist earthquakes, aging, weather, and seawater have been known since the times of ancient Rome and are still the object of research.<br/>While the field of mechanically healable materials is relatively established, self-healing conductors are still rare, and are nowadays attracting enormous interest for applications in electronic skin for health monitoring, wearable and stretchable sensors, actuators, transistors, energy harvesting, and storage devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors. Self-healing can significantly enhance the lifetime of conducting materials, leading to the improved environmental sustainability and reduced costs.<br/>Conducting polymers exhibit attractive properties, such as mixed ionic-electronic conductivity, leading to low interfacial impedance, tunability by chemical synthesis, ease of process via solution process and printing, and biomechanical compatibility with living tissues, which makes them ideal materials for bioelectronics and stretchable electronics. However, they show typically poor mechanical properties and are therefore not suitable as self-healing materials. Self-healing conductors can be achieved upon mixing with other polymers, such as poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), which provide the mechanical characteristics leading to self-healing.<br/>My talk will deal with processing and characterization of conducting polymer films and hydrogels and devices for healable, flexible, stretchable and electronics as well as for implantable electrodes. I will particularly focus on processing strategies to fabricate stretchable and self-healing conductors and their applications. [1-9]<br/>References<br/>Y. Li, X. Zhou, B. Sarkar, N. Gagnon-Lafrenais, and F. Cicoira, <i>Adv. Mater.</i> 2108932, 2022.<br/>Y. Li, X. Li, S. Zhang, L. Liu, N. Hamad, S. R. Bobbara, D. Pasini, F. Cicoira, <i>Adv. Funct. Mater.</i>, 30, 2002853, 2020.<br/>Y. Li, X. Li, R. N. Unnava Venkata, S. Zhang, F. Cicoira, <i>Flexible and Printed Electronics</i> 4, 044004, 2019.<br/>N. Rossetti, P. Luthra, J. Hagler, A. H. J. Lee, C. Bodart, X. Li, G. Ducharme et al., <i>ACS Appl. Bio Mater. </i>2, 5154-5163, 2019.<br/>[5] C. Bodart, N. Rossetti, S. Schougaard, F. Amzica, F. Cicoira et al., <i>ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces</i>, 11, 17226-17233, 2019.<br/>[6] S. Zhang, Y. Li, G. Tomasello, M. Anthonisen, X. Li, M. Mazzeo, A. Genco, P. Grutter, F. Cicoira, <i>Adv. Electron. Mater,</i> 1900191, 2019<i>.</i><br/>S. Zhang, F. Cicoira, Adv. Mater. 29, 1703098, 2017.<br/>X. Zhou, A. Rajeev, A. Subramanian, Y. Li, N. Rossetti, G. Natale, G. A. Lodygensky, and F. Cicoira, <i>Acta Biomaterialia,</i> 139, 296-306, 2022.