Highly Stretchable, Adhesive, and Self-Healing Silk Fibroin-Dopted Hydrogels for Wearable Sensors

In recent years, the preparations of flexible electronic devices have attracted great attention. Here, a simple one-pot method of thermal polymerization is introduced to fabricate silk fibroin-dopted hydrogels (SFHs), which are both chemically and physically cross-linked by acrylamide (AM), acrylic acid (AA), and silk fibroin (SF). The addition of SF can effectively enhance the mechanical property of the SFH12% by 59% compared with SFH0%. Taking the advantage of its wide working range of stress (about 0.455-568.9 kPa), the SFH can work as a resistance-type pressure sensor to monitor different human motions. What is more, the excellent adhesion, about 75.17 N m(-1) of SFH46% enables it to fit tightly to other objects during the testing, which significantly reduces the loss of small signals due to poor fit. In addition, the SFH demonstrates excellent self-healing property without requiring external excitation and a sensitive temperature response in the range of -10 to 60 degrees C. The SFH is expected to be applied in the field of electronic skin, soft robots, and other flexible electronic products as well as speech recognition.

Automated summary

The one-pot method of thermal polymerization is introduced to fabricate silk fibroin-doped hydrogels, which exhibit excellent mechanical properties, adhesion, and self-healing capabilities, making them suitable for applications in pressure sensors and electronic skin fields.