Biofuel-powered soft electronic skin with multiplexed and wireless sensing for human-machine interfaces
Abstract
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.
Additional Information
© 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Submitted 11 October 2019; Accepted 18 March 2020; Published 22 April 2020. This work was supported by California Institute of Technology Startup Grant, the Rothenberg Innovation Initiative (RI2) program, the Carver Mead New Adventures Fund, and NIH (no. 5R21NR018271) (all to W.G.). We gratefully acknowledge critical support and infrastructure provided for this work by the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech. Author contributions: W.G. and Y.Y. conceived the project. W.G. supervised the studies and Y.Y. led the experiments. J.N., C.X., and Y.Y. contributed to the system development, fabrication, and characterization; J.M., A.D., and R.D. contributed to the electronic circuit design and test. A.H. and Y.S. contributed to sensor preparation and characterization. R.G. and A.D.A. contributed to the prosthesis control study. Y. Yu, Y. Yang, and W.G. contributed the data analysis and co-wrote the paper. All authors provided feedback on the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing financial interest. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper or the Supplementary Materials.Attached Files
Accepted Version - nihms-1598387.pdf
Supplemental Material - aaz7946_Movie_S1.mp4
Supplemental Material - aaz7946_Movie_S2.mp4
Supplemental Material - aaz7946_SM.pdf
Files
Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC7326328
- Eprint ID
- 102720
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200422-130006132
- Caltech
- Rothenberg Innovation Initiative (RI2)
- Carver Mead New Adventures Fund
- 5R21NR018271
- NIH
- Created
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2020-04-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-07-18Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute