Future wearables by soft electronic materials

Wearable devices enable long-term and precise healthcare monitoring without medical professionals, which is especially important in a pandemic or aging society. As the next-generation of current wearable devices in the form of a watch or ring, wearable devices with skin-like softness and stretchability have been developed for improved comfort of wear and signal integrity. In this talk, we introduce several soft electronic materials by fully utilizing a variety of soft nanomaterials (e.g., silver nanowires, carbon nanotubes, polymer semiconductors, liquid metals) to realize soft electronic devices. Examples include wireless stretchable sensors to form body-area sensor networks, and stretchable high-frequency diodes to enable wireless operation of sensor and display. Furthermore, we discuss the application of skin-like soft electronic devices in human-computer interfaces for seamless communications between robots and humans.