Smart Skins Based on Assembled Piezoresistive Networks of Sustainable Graphene Microcapsules for High Precision Health Diagnostics

Abstract

The environmental impact of plastic waste has had a profound effect on our livelihoods and there is a need for future plastic-based epidermal electronics to trend toward more sustainable approaches. Infusing graphene into the culinary process of seaweed spherification produces core-shell, food-based nanocomposites with properties exhibiting a remarkably high degree of tunability. Unusually, mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical metrics all became decoupled from one another, allowing for each to be individually tuned. This leads to the formation of a general electromechanical model which presents a universal electronic blueprint for enhanced performances. Through this model, performance optimization and system miniaturization are enabled, with gauge factors (G) >108 for capsule diameters (D) ≈290 µm and produced at a record rate of >100 samples per second. When coalesced into quasi-2D planar networks, microcapsules form the basis of discrete, recyclable electronic smart skins with areal independent sensitives for muscular, breathing, pulse, and blood pressure measurements in real-time.