Ultra‐Conformable Ionic Skin with Multi‐Modal Sensing, Broad‐Spectrum Antimicrobial and Regenerative Capabilities for Smart and Expedited Wound Care

Abstract

While rapid wound healing is essential yet challenging, there is also an unmet need for functional restoration of sensation. Inspired by natural skin, an ultra‐conformable, adhesive multi‐functional ionic skin (MiS) with multi‐modal sensing capability is devised for smart and expedited wound care. The base of MiS is a unique skin‐like, conductive and self‐adaptive adhesive polyacrylamide/starch double‐network hydrogel (PSH) and self‐powered, flexible, triboelectric sensor(s) is integrated on top of PSH for multi‐tactile sensing. MiS could enhance wound contraction, collagen deposition, angiogenesis, and epidermis formation in a full‐thickness skin defect wound model in vivo, while significantly inhibiting the biofilm formation of a wide range of microorganisms. MiS also exhibits multi‐modal sensing capability for smart and instant therapeutics and diagnostics, including skin displacement or joint motion, temperature, pressure and tissue exudate changes of wound bed, and locally releasing drugs in a pH‐responsive manner. More importantly, MiS could restore the skin‐mimicking tactile sensing function of both touch location and intensity, and thus could be used as a human‐machine interface for accurate external robotic control. MiS demonstrates a new comprehensive paradigm of combining wound diagnosis and healing, broad‐spectrum anti‐microbial capability and restoration of multi‐tactile sensing for the reparation of severe wound.

Flexible Bicolorimetric Polyacrylamide/Chitosan Hydrogels for Smart Real‐Time Monitoring and Promotion of Wound Healing

“…At present, the common wound monitoring based on the colorimetric method is not accurate enough, and the equipment based on microelectronics is easy to be polluted, resulting in an inaccurate measurement. [32,59] Based on the cationic polymer PAM, we introduced the cationic antibacterial component quaternary ammonium salt chitosan into the hydrogels through physical entanglement, offering the hydrogels with good antibacterial performance. Compared with the antibiotics-delivery method, material-contact-guided bacteriostasis has higher safety and can maintain a longer-period antibacterial effect.…”

Hydrogels for Treatment of Different Degrees of Osteoarthritis

“…Natural polymer materials have been used widely in human health engineering and regenerative tissue—for example, skin ( Lin X. et al, 2021 ), cartilage, bone, and muscle ( Lin et al, 2019 )—and wound healing ( Mao et al, 2020 ; Mao et al, 2021 ; Yin et al, 2021 ) owing to their unique advantages, such as biocompatibility, degradability, porous structure, and achievable mechanical adjustments. Although they belong to natural source materials, they have different advantages and disadvantages.…”

Progress in the Triboelectric Human–Machine Interfaces (HMIs)-Moving from Smart Gloves to AI/Haptic Enabled HMI in the 5G/IoT Era

“…In addition, a tactile sensing patch is also a common form of wearable HMI by collecting finger touching/sliding movements to realize simple manipulation commands [174][175][176][177][178][179] Currently, TENG tactile HMIs commonly consist of a large number of sensing pixels, where each pixel is connected to an independent output, resulting in complex readout circuits and output signals [180][181][182][183][184][185][186][187]. In order to simplify the outputs to effectively reduce the difficulty and cost of data collection and processing, some novel solutions with minimalistic electrode design have been demonstrated recently [188][189][190][191][192][193]. A two-dimensional TENG patch with a 5 × 5 pixel matrix for finger trajectory sensing was developed by Chen et al as shown in Figure 3e [170].…”