Mussel-inspired adhesive and conductive hydrogel with tunable mechanical properties for wearable strain sensors

摘要

Hypothesis: Flexible and wearable hydrogel strain sensors have attracted significant attention for human activity monitoring and electronic skins. However, it remains a great challenge to develop an integrated hydrogel strain sensor showing intrinsic adhesive performances, tunable mechanical and high strain sensitive properties. Marine mussels show a superior capacity to adhere to various substrates (including organic and inorganic), while polycaprolactone (PCL) can be easily modified into crosslinkers with different degrees of functionality (bi-, tri-, and quadri-functional groups) to control the crosslinking density. Therefore, the developed mussel-inspired 3,4-dihydroxyphenyl-L-alanine acrylamide-polycaprolactone (L-DMA-PCL) hydrogels could address these issues and serve as the potential wearable strain sensors for biomaterials and healthcare monitoring.