Stand-Alone Conformable Bioelectronics Based on Integrated Internal Ion-Gated Organic Electrochemical Transistors

Effectiveness of medical treatments can be greatly influenced by individual variations, prompting the need for methods that enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals and personalized responsive delivery of therapeutics. Implanted bioelectronic devices play a crucial role in these methods, but there are challenges that prevent their widespread adoption. The ability to perform these demanding electronic functions in the complex physiological environment with minimum disruption to the biological tissue remains a big challenge. An optimal fully implantable bioelectronic device would require each component from the front-end to the data transmission unit to be conformable and biocompatible. For this reason, organic material-based conformable electronics are ideal candidates for components of bioelectronic circuits due to their inherent flexibility, and soft nature. Here, we present a vertical internal ion-gated organic electrochemical transistors (vIGT) as a high-density, high-amplification sensing component as well as a low leakage, high- speed processing unit. In addition, a novel wireless, battery-free strategy for electrophysiological signal acquisition, processing, and transmission that employs IGTs and an ionic communication circuit (IC) is introduced. We show that the wirelessly-powered IGTs are able to acquire and modulate neurophysiological data in vivo and transmit them transdermally, eliminating the need for any hard Si-based electronics in the implant.