We present gas-permeable, ultrathin, and stretchable electrodes enabled by self-assembled porous substrates and conductive nanostructures. An efficient and scalable breath figure method is employed to introduce the porous skeleton, and then silver nanowires (AgNWs) are dip-coated and heat-pressed to offer electric conductivity. The resulting film has a transmittance of 61%, sheet resistance of 7.3 Ω/sq, and water vapor permeability of 23 mg cm–2 h–1. With AgNWs embedded below the surface of the polymer, the electrode exhibits excellent stability in the presence of sweat and after long-term wear. We demonstrate the promising potential of the electrode for wearable electronics in two representative applications: skin-mountable biopotential sensing for healthcare and textile-integrated touch sensing for human–machine interfaces. The electrode can form conformal contact with human skin, leading to low skin–electrode impedance and high-quality biopotential signals. In addition, the textile electrode can be used in a self-capacitance wireless touch sensing system.

PSS (5.2 eV) hole extraction layer. The modified Cu mesh electrodes show remarkable potential as a substitute of ITO/PET in the flexible OPV and OLED devices. The OPV cells constructed on our Cu mesh electrodes present a similar power conversion efficiency of 2.04% as those on ITO/PET electrodes. The flexible OLED prototype devices can achieve a brightness of 10 000 cd at an operation voltage of 8 V.

Although plenty of active materials could be used as supercapacitor electrodes, only limited ones have been engineered to construct transparent supercapacitors. Specially, it is a great challenge to make opaque metal oxides, which often own high energy density, into transparent films. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach to fabricate transparent MnO films for flexible transparent supercapacitors. By utilizing breath-figure polymer films with ordered pores as template, arrays of MnO islands were electrochemically deposited, with high light transmission. The thickness and interspace distance of MnO island arrays could be adjusted by tuning deposition time so that the capacitance and transparency of the electrodes are changed accordingly. Such island array structure can effectively eliminate the internal stress existing in the composite film to avoid cracks during bending operation. The assembled transparent supercapacitor shows a transmittance of 44% at 550 nm and can yield a high capacitance of 4.73 mF/cm at a current density of 50 μA/cm, demonstrating high flexibility and stability.