Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter−2 for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH4+, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking.

The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed "PlantCopter", used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.

Human skin and hair can simultaneously feel pressure, temperature, humidity, strain, and fl ow-great inspirations for applications such as artifi cial skins for burn and acid victims, robotics, and vehicular technology. Previous efforts in this direction use sophisticated materials or processes. Chemically functionalized, inkjet printed or vacuum-technology-processed papers albeit cheap have shown limited functionalities. Thus, performance and/or functionalities per cost have been limited. Here, a scalable "garage" fabrication approach is shown using off-the-shelf inexpensive household elements such as aluminum foil, scotch tapes, sticky-notes, napkins, and sponges to build "paper skin" with simultaneous real-time sensing capability of pressure, temperature, humidity, proximity, pH, and fl ow. Enabling the basic principles of porosity, adsorption, and dimensions of these materials, a fully functioning distributed sensor network platform is reported, which, for the fi rst time, can sense the vitals of its carrier (body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and skin hydration) and the surrounding environment.

Unprecedented 800% stretchable, non-polymeric, widely used, low-cost, naturally rigid, metallic thin-film copper (Cu)-based flexible and non-invasive, spatially tunable, mobile thermal patch with wireless controllability, adaptability (tunes the amount of heat based on the temperature of the swollen portion), reusability, and affordability due to low-cost complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible integration.

Current marine research primarily depends on weighty and invasive sensory equipment and telemetric network to understand the marine environment, including the diverse fauna it contains, as a function of animal behavior and size, as well as equipment longevity. To match animal morphology and activity within the surrounding marine environment, here we show a physically flexible and stretchable skin-like and waterproof autonomous multifunctional system, integrating Bluetooth, memory chip, and high performance physical sensors. The sensory tag is mounted on a swimming crab (Portunus pelagicus) and is capable of continuous logging of depth, temperature, and salinity within the harsh ocean environment. The fully packaged, ultra-lightweight (<2.4 g in water), and compliant "Marine Skin" system does not have any wired connection enabling safe and weightless cuttingedge approach to monitor and assess marine life and the ecosystem's health to support conservation and management of marine ecosystems.