Development of Bio‐Voltage Operated Humidity‐Sensory Neurons Comprising Self‐Assembled Peptide Memristors

Abstract

Biomimetic humidity sensors offer a low‐power approach for respiratory monitoring in early lung‐disease diagnosis. However, balancing miniaturization and energy efficiency remains challenging. This study addresses this issue by introducing a bioinspired humidity‐sensing neuron comprising a self‐assembled peptide nanowire (NW) memristor with unique proton‐coupled ion transport. The proposed neuron shows a low Ag+ activation energy owing to the NW and redox activity of the tyrosine (Tyr)‐rich peptide in the system, facilitating ultralow electric‐field–driven threshold switching and a high energy efficiency. Additionally, Ag+ migration in the system can be controlled by a proton source owing to the hydrophilic nature of the phenolic hydroxyl group in Tyr, enabling the humidity‐based control of the conductance state of the memristor. Furthermore, a memristor‐based neuromorphic perception neuron that can encode humidity signals into spikes is proposed. The spiking characteristics of this neuron can be modulated to emulate the strength‐modulated spike‐frequency characteristics of biological neurons. A three‐layer spiking neural network with input neurons comprising these highly tunable humidity perception neurons shows an accuracy of 92.68% in lung‐disease diagnosis. This study paves the way for developing bioinspired self‐assembly strategies to construct neuromorphic perception systems, bridging the gap between artificial and biological sensing and processing paradigms.