Pencil–paper on-skin electronics
Yadong Xu, Ganggang Zhao, Liang Zhu, Qihui Fei, Zhe Zhang, Zanyu Chen, Fufei An, Yangyang Chen, Yun Ling, Peijun Guo, Shinghua Ding, Guoliang Huang, Pai‐Yen Chen, Qing Cao, Zheng Yan
Abstract
Significance On-skin electronics are usually fabricated by patterning conventional inorganic materials, novel organic materials, or emerging nanomaterials on flexible polymer substrates. Consequently, the state-of-the-art on-skin electronics usually suffer from expensive precursor materials, costly fabrication facilities, complex fabrication processes, and limited disposability. By using widely accessible pencils and papers as tools, we have developed a variety of cost-effective and disposable on-skin electronic devices, ranging from biophysical sensors and sweat biochemical sensors to thermal stimulators, humidity energy harvesters, and transdermal drug-delivery systems. Also, pencil–paper-based antennas, two-dimensional and three-dimensional circuits, and reconfigurable structures are demonstrated. The enabled devices can find wide applications particularly in low-resource environments and home-centered personal healthcare owing to their low-cost resources, handy operation, time-saving fabrication, and abundant potential designs.