Edible and Nutritive Electronics: Materials, Fabrications, Components, and Applications

The emerging novel edible and nutritive electronics indicate an important advance in ingestible and implantable electronics, covering multiple disciplines such as biomedicine, electronics, and nutriology. This review focuses on the feasibility and critical technical problems of fabricating fully edible and nutritive electronics. Recently, a limited number of fully edible and nutritive electronics, operating single functions, have been applied to monitor the condition of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and diagnose its disorders. However, fully edible, nutritive, miniaturized, and well-functioning electronics with multiple functions are challenging to fabricate. The toxicity of materials used in edible electronics is controllable. The lifetime of edible electronics can be predicted by theoretical and empirical models, and can be tuned by integration strategies. The discipline of edible and nutritive electronics is still in its infancy. In the future, many novel edible materials, integration strategies, and advanced biosensing and wirelessly communicating technologies may be applied to sensing target biomarkers. A more realistic GI tract simulator will be widely used to evaluate the various properties of edible and nutritive electronics rapidly during the process of degradation in the GI tract. Finally, the ethical and legal issues of edible and nutritive electronics will attract more attention.