Environmental Monitoring with Additively Manufactured Tattoo-Based Bioelectronics

The emergence of printed, low-cost, and conformable organic electronics that can be used for environmental monitoring are of great interest in plant biology and sustainable agriculture.Specifically, ultra-thin electronic biosensors that can conform to the outer surface of living organisms provide an exciting non-invasive method for measuring essential physiological characteristics in real-time. This presentation will describe fully printed Organic Electrochemical Transistor (OECT)-based sensors that were integrated onto the surface of living plant tissue for real-time moisture and pH recording. The OECTs were based on poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiopene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) and were manufactured with scalable printing techniques, which makes them suitable for large-area electronics (LAE) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Tattoo transfer paper was utilized to fabricate <1 µm thick devices that can easily conform and cohere to living plant tissues.Polymer-based functional layers were also used to enable multi-analyte sensing while preserving the conformability and applicability of the transistors. The results confirm that ultra-thin, self-adhering organic electronics are a suitable path to high throughput assessment of plant health.