Finding ways to attach the human body to technology could have broad applications in health and entertainment. A brand new “electric plastic” could make self-powered wearables, real-time neural interfaces, and medical implants that merge with our bodies a reality.
While there was significant progress in the event of wearable and implantable technology lately, most electronic materials are hard, rigid, and have toxic metals. Quite a lot of approaches for creating “soft electronics” has emerged, but finding ones which are durable, power-efficient, and straightforward to fabricate is a major challenge.
Organic ferroelectric materials are promising because they exhibit spontaneous polarization, which suggests they’ve a stable electric field pointing in a selected direction. This polarization could be flipped by applying an external electrical field, allowing them to operate like a bit in a traditional computer.
Essentially the most successful soft ferroelectric is a cloth called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), which has been utilized in business products like wearable sensors, medical imaging, underwater navigation devices, and soft robots. But PVDF’s electrical properties can break down when exposed to higher temperatures, and it requires high voltages to flip its polarization.
Now, in a paper published in Nature, researchers at Northwestern University have shown that combining the fabric with short chains of amino acids generally known as peptides can dramatically reduce power requirements and boost heat tolerance. And the incorporation of biomolecules into the fabric opens the prospect of directly interfacing electronics with the body.
To create their recent “electric plastic” the team used a kind of molecule generally known as a peptide amphiphile. These molecules feature a water-repelling component that helps them self-assemble into complex structures. The researchers connected these peptides to short strands of PVDF and exposed them to water, causing the peptides to cluster together.
This made the strands coalesce into long, flexible ribbons. In testing, the team found the fabric could withstand temperatures of 110 degrees Celsius, which is roughly 40 degrees higher than previous PVDF materials. Switching the fabric’s polarization also required significantly lower voltages, despite being made up of 49 percent peptides by weight.
The researchers told Science that in addition to having the ability to store energy or information in the fabric’s polarization, it’s also biocompatible. This implies it might be utilized in every little thing from wearable devices that monitor vital signs to flexible implants that may replace pacemakers. The peptides is also connected to proteins inside cells to record biological activity and even stimulate it.
One challenge is that although PVDF is biocompatible, it might probably break down into so-called “without end chemicals,” which remain within the environment for hundreds of years and studies have linked to health and environmental problems. Several other chemicals the researchers used to fabricate their material also fall into this category.
“This advance has enabled various attractive properties in comparison with other organic polymers,” Frank Leibfarth, of UNC Chapel Hill, told Science. But he identified that the researchers had only tested very small amounts of the molecule, and it’s unclear how easy it can be to scale them up.
If the researchers can extend the approach to larger scales, nevertheless, it could bring a number of exciting recent possibilities on the interface between our bodies and technology.
