Sihong Wang1
University of Chicago1
The vast amount of biological mysteries and biomedical challenges faced by humans provide a prominent drive for seamlessly merging electronics with biological living systems (e.g. human bodies) to achieve long-term stable functions. Towards this trend, one of the key requirements for electronics is to possess biomimetic form-factors in various aspects and continuous energy supply for achieving long-term compatible and sustainable operations. This goal conjunctionally relies on two aspects. First, the entire electronic systems (including the power sources) are desired to have similar mechanical (i.e., soft and stretchable) properties with the skin and biological tissues, so as to improve the wearing comfort, suppress invasive reactions, and enhance the signal quality. Second, the power sources of the electronics, which have been conventionally served by rigid batteries, should be sustainable and maintenance-free, ideally with an unlimited lifetime. In this talk, I will introduce our innovative use of polymer chemistry and engineering for achieving stretchable triboelectric nanogenerators that can efficiently harvest energy from human body movements, as well as our developments of stretchable electronic devices, sensors, and light-emitting devices, for ultimately producing fully integrated systems for human-body interfacing.