Flexible bioelectronic innovation for personalized health management

摘要

With the vigorous development of intelligent medical care and interdisciplinary science, innovative flexible bioelectronics (FBEs) are emerging in health monitoring, disease diagnosis and treatment, and even cancer therapy. This work comments on the recent progress of FBEs in personalized health management, emphasizing its innovative role in cancer therapy. Future perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for the next-generation innovative FBEs are also proposed. With the rapid developments in intelligent medical care and interdisciplinary science, innovative flexible bioelectronics (FBEs) are emerging for monitoring health, diagnosing and treating diseases, and even cancer therapy. FBEs subvert physical form and break through the bottleneck of traditional rigid electronics, rendering intimate and non-invasive contact with the human body to stably capture physiological signals or accurately administer therapeutic interventions. Like other biomedical devices and systems, miniaturization, multi-functionalization, and intelligence are current challenges and directions for future developments in FBEs. Future perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for the next generation of innovative FBEs are also proposed. Innovative FBEs are portable electronic devices that integrate sensors into or combine with the human body to collect and manage personal health records using mobile devices. Most existing wearable FBEs focus on monitoring biophysical or biochemical parameters such as body movement, respiration rate, heart rate, oxygen saturation, sweat volume, and calories [1], which are critical primary data for health management (Figure 1). For example, the FBE-based tactile sensor (capacitive, resistive, optical, electromagnetic, piezoelectric), which has three-dimensional force perception capability to adjust grasping posture and grasping force in real time through a tactile perception feedback function, can accurately identify the grasped object. These FBEs have great application value for intelligent prosthetics, medical rehabilitation, and surgical robots [2]. Bodily fluids such as blood, tears, sweat, urine, and saliva contain physiologically relevant molecules and biomarkers that can provide helpful information for medical diagnostics. FBEs can monitor biomarker-rich bodily fluids non-invasively to provide insights into patient's health at the molecular level. Additionally, levels of electrolytes such as Na+, K+, NH4+, and Ca2+, and pH and metabolites such as glucose, uric acid, lactate, ascorbic acid, and urea can be analyzed by biosensors, providing valuable information for healthcare suggestions [3]. For instance, physiological and psychological stress can be dynamically assessed by analyzing concentrations of cortisol, glucose, and vitamin C in sweat. However, a single sensing signal cannot fulfill the current needs for monitoring health. Thus, multifunctional co-sensing FBEs have become the mainstream of flexible health electronics research. FBEs integrate different material systems and functional units onto flexible substrates [4], such as ultrasound transducers and electrochemical sensors that simultaneously monitor blood pressure, heart rate, lactate, and caffeine in sweat. In general, FBEs for signal sensing and disease diagnosis are combined with the human body in the form of tattoos, gloves, clothes, dental braces, armbands, electronic skin, and flexible contact lenses to record and calculate data on various biochemical markers in human bodily fluids and mechanical movements of the body. Accurate health assessments require real-time monitoring of multiple physical and biochemical signals; however, simultaneously capturing and calibrating numerous signals remains a considerable challenge. Ensuring that the materials are nontoxic to humans is the foremost step. The long-term effects of these functional materials in humans are still uncertain and require further long-term studies in animals/humans for validati