Over the years, researchers have made significant strides in the development of novel flexible/stretchable and conductive materials, enabling the creation of cutting-edge electronic devices for wearable applications. Among these, porous conductive textiles (PCTs) have emerged as an ideal material platform for wearable electronics, owing to their light weight, flexibility, permeability, and wearing comfort. This Review aims to present a comprehensive overview of the progress and state of the art of utilizing PCTs for the design and fabrication of a wide variety of wearable electronic devices and their integrated wearable systems. To begin with, we elucidate how PCTs revolutionize the form factors of wearable electronics. We then discuss the preparation strategies of PCTs, in terms of the raw materials, fabrication processes, and key properties. Afterward, we provide detailed illustrations of how PCTs are used as basic building blocks to design and fabricate a wide variety of intrinsically flexible or stretchable devices, including sensors, actuators, therapeutic devices, energy-harvesting and storage devices, and displays. We further describe the techniques and strategies for wearable electronic systems either by hybridizing conventional off-the-shelf rigid electronic components with PCTs or by integrating multiple fibrous devices made of PCTs. Subsequently, we highlight some important wearable application scenarios in healthcare, sports and training, converging technologies, and professional specialists. At the end of the Review, we discuss the challenges and perspectives on future research directions and give overall conclusions. As the demand for more personalized and interconnected devices continues to grow, PCT-based wearables hold immense potential to redefine the landscape of wearable technology and reshape the way we live, work, and play.

Porous Conductive Textiles for Wearable Electronics.

The recent exponential growth of metaverse technology has been instrumental in reshaping a myriad of sectors, not least digital healthcare. This comprehensive review critically examines the landscape and future applications of metaverse wearables toward immersive digital healthcare. The key technologies and advancements that have spearheaded the metamorphosis of metaverse wearables are categorized, encapsulating all-encompassed extended reality, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and other haptic feedback systems. Moreover, the fundamentals of their deployment in assistive healthcare (especially for rehabilitation), medical and nursing education, and remote patient management and treatment are investigated. The potential benefits of integrating metaverse wearables into healthcare paradigms are multifold, encompassing improved patient prognosis, enhanced accessibility to high-quality care, and high standards of practitioner instruction. Nevertheless, these technologies are not without their inherent challenges and untapped opportunities, which span privacy protection, data safeguarding, and innovation in artificial intelligence. In summary, future research trajectories and potential advancements to circumvent these hurdles are also discussed, further augmenting the incorporation of metaverse wearables within healthcare infrastructures in the post-pandemic era.

Metaverse Wearables for Immersive Digital Healthcare: A Review.

Haptic human-machine interfaces (HHMIs) combine tactile sensation and haptic feedback to allow humans to interact closely with machines and robots, providing immersive experiences and convenient lifestyles. Significant progress has been made in developing wearable sensors that accurately detect physical and electrophysiological stimuli with improved softness, functionality, reliability, and selectivity. In addition, soft actuating systems have been developed to provide high-quality haptic feedback by precisely controlling force, displacement, frequency, and spatial resolution. In this Review, we discuss the latest technological advances of soft sensors and actuators for the demonstration of wearable HHMIs. We particularly focus on highlighting material and structural approaches that enable desired sensing and feedback properties necessary for effective wearable HHMIs. Furthermore, promising practical applications of current HHMI technology in various areas such as the metaverse, robotics, and user-interactive devices are discussed in detail. Finally, this Review further concludes by discussing the outlook for next-generation HHMI technology.

Soft Sensors and Actuators for Wearable Human-Machine Interfaces.

Conductive microfibers play a significant role in the flexibility, stretchability, and conductivity of electronic skin (e-skin). Currently, the fabrication of conductive microfibers suffers from either time-consuming and complex operations or is limited in complex fabrication environments. Thus, it presents a one-step method to prepare conductive hydrogel microfibers based on microfluidics for the construction of ultrastretchable e-skin. The microfibers are achieved with conductive MXene cores and hydrogel shells, which are solidified with the covalent cross-linking between sodium alginate and calcium chloride, and mechanically enhanced by the complexation reaction of poly(vinyl alcohol) and sodium hydroxide. The microfiber conductivities are tailorable by adjusting the flow rate and concentration of core and shell fluids, which is essential to more practical applications in complex scenarios. More importantly, patterned e-skin based on conductive hydrogel microfibers can be constructed by combining microfluidics with 3D printing technology. Because of the great advantages in mechanical and electrical performance of the microfibers, the achieved e-skin shows impressive stretching and sensitivity, which also demonstrate attractive application values in motion monitoring and gesture recognition. These characteristics indicate that the ultrastretchable e-skin based on conductive hydrogel microfibers has great potential for applications in health monitoring, wearable devices, and smart medicine.

Ultrastretchable E-Skin Based on Conductive Hydrogel Microfibers for Wearable Sensors.

Abstract Human-machine interfaces for capturing, conveying, and sharing tactile information across time and space hold immense potential for healthcare, augmented and virtual reality, human-robot collaboration, and skill development. To realize this potential, such interfaces should be wearable, unobtrusive, and scalable regarding both resolution and body coverage. Taking a step towards this vision, we present a textile-based wearable human-machine interface with integrated tactile sensors and vibrotactile haptic actuators that are digitally designed and rapidly fabricated. We leverage a digital embroidery machine to seamlessly embed piezoresistive force sensors and arrays of vibrotactile actuators into textiles in a customizable, scalable, and modular manner. We use this process to create gloves that can record, reproduce, and transfer tactile interactions. User studies investigate how people perceive the sensations reproduced by our gloves with integrated vibrotactile haptic actuators. To improve the effectiveness of tactile interaction transfer, we develop a machine-learning pipeline that adaptively models how each individual user reacts to haptic sensations and then optimizes haptic feedback parameters. Our interface showcases adaptive tactile interaction transfer through the implementation of three end-to-end systems: alleviating tactile occlusion, guiding people to perform physical skills, and enabling responsive robot teleoperation. 

Adaptive tactile interaction transfer via digitally embroidered smart gloves

Tactile sensations are mainly transmitted to each other by physical touch. Wireless touch perception could be a revolution for us to interact with the world. Here, we report a wireless self-sensing and haptic-reproducing electronic skin (e-skin) to realize noncontact touch communications. A flexible self-sensing actuator was developed to provide an integrated function in both tactile sensing and haptic feedback. When this e-skin was dynamically pressed, the actuator generated an induced voltage as tactile information. Via wireless communication, another e-skin could receive this tactile data and run a synchronized haptic reproduction. Thus, touch could be wirelessly conveyed in bidirections between two users as a touch intercom. Furthermore, this e-skin could be connected with various smart devices to form a touch internet of things where one-to-one and one-to-multiple touch delivery could be realized. This wireless touch presents huge potentials in remote touch video, medical care/assistance, education, and many other applications.

Touch IoT enabled by wireless self-sensing and haptic-reproducing electronic skin

Miniaturized mobile electronic system is an effective candidate for in situ exploration of confined spaces. However, realizing such system still faces challenges in powering issue, untethered mobility, wireless data acquisition, sensing versatility, and integration in small scales. Here, we report a battery-free, wireless, and miniaturized soft electromagnetic swimmer (SES) electronic system that achieves multiple monitoring capability in confined water environments. Through radio frequency powering, the battery-free SES system demonstrates untethered motions in confined spaces with considerable moving speed under resonance. This system adopts soft electronic technologies to integrate thin multifunctional bio/chemical sensors and wireless data acquisition module, and performs real-time water quality and virus contamination detection with demonstrated promising limits of detection and high sensitivity. All sensing data are transmitted synchronously and displayed on a smartphone graphical user interface via near-field communication. Overall, this wireless smart system demonstrates broad potential for confined space exploration, ranging from pathogen detection to pollution investigation.

Battery-free, wireless, and electricity-driven soft swimmer for water quality and virus monitoring

Soft actuators have been an important research focus in robotics due to their advantages in nondestructive contact and excellent motion adaptability, which enable flexible manipulation, extreme environments exploration, and in vivo surgical treatment. Various soft robots actuated electrically, magnetically, optically, and fluidically are built toward different application scenarios. Among them, electrical actuation method is an advanced choice to actuate and control soft actuators that are expected to be compatible and integrated with existing industrial robotic systems and wearable intelligent devices. Current robotic systems have higher requirements on the actuators’ function, which can be explored through material and structural designs. Based on a variety of deformable materials, the structural design enables the soft actuators to span from low dimension to high dimension with further improvement in function. Therefore, in this review, 2D and 3D electrical-based soft actuators from the perspective of dimension design are introduced, which involve functional materials, structure design, and fabrication technology. Some novel 3D fabrication methods, such as the 3D compressive buckling process, are summarized to build 3D soft robots. This review aims at offering important guidelines for the development of soft actuators and the construction of integrated robotic systems in the future. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aisy.202300070

Recent Advances in Electrically Driven Soft Actuators across Dimensional Scales from 2D to 3D

At present, touch communication with each other mainly relies on direct physical contact. Imagine if touch communication could be realized in non-contact wireless ways just as sight and sound do, there could be a revolutionary change in the way that we feel the world. Here, we developed a haptic interface with self-sensing actuators for wireless touch communication. The flexible self-sensing actuator owns the functions in both tactile sensing and haptic feedback. When this soft haptic interface is conformally worn on the skin and dynamically pressed, the actuators on the interface will generate a response sensing voltage as tactile signal. When the actuator is actuated by an alternating voltage, the magnet in the actuator will generate a mechanical vibration as the haptic feedback. Via wireless Bluetooth transmission, one haptic interface could receive the tactile signal from the other haptic interface and then run synchronized haptic feedback. Thus, the touch communication is realized between two users in bidirectional way. This wireless touch communication also makes remote touch video possible, which will greatly enrich human social experience and shorten the social distance. 

Haptic interface with flexible self-sensing actuators for wireless touch communication

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Touch IoT enabled by wireless self-sensing and haptic-reproducing electronic skin

Battery-free, wireless, and electricity-driven soft swimmer for water quality and virus monitoring

Recent Advances in Electrically Driven Soft Actuators across Dimensional Scales from 2D to 3D

Haptic interface with flexible self-sensing actuators for wireless touch communication