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Breathable Kirigami-Shaped Ionotronic e-Textile with Touch/Strain Sensing for Friendly Epidermal Electronics

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Abstract

Flexible ionotronic devices have great potential to revolutionize epidermal electronics. However, the lack of breathability in most ionotronic devices is a significance barrier to practical application. Herein, a breathable kirigami-shaped ionotronic e-textile with two functions of sensing (touch and strain) is designed, by integrating silk fabric and kirigami-shaped ionic hydrogel. The kirigami-shaped ionic hydrogel, combined with fluffy silk fabric, allows the ionotronic e-textile to achieve excellent breathability and comfortability. Furthermore, the fabricated ionotronic e-textile can precisely perform the function of touch sensing and strain perception. For touch-sensing, the ionotronic e-textile can detect the position of finger touching point with a fast response time (3 ms) based on the interruption of the ion field. For strain sensing, large workable strain range (> 100%), inconspicuous drift (< 0.78%) and long-term stability (> 10,000 cycles) is demonstrated. On the proof of concept, a fabric keyboard and game controlling sleeve have been designed to display touch and strain sensing functions. The ionotronic e-textile break through the bottlenecks of traditional wearable ionotronic devices, suggesting a great promising application in future wearable epidermal electronics.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Shandong Province Key Research and Development Plan (2019JZZY010335, 2019JZZY010340), Anhui Province Special Science and Technology Project (201903a05020028), Shandong Provincial Universities Youth Innovation Technology Plan Team (2020KJA013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Bio-Fibers and Eco-Textiles, Research Center for Intelligent and Wearable Technology, College of Textiles and Clothing, Collaborative Innovation Center for Eco-Textiles of Shandong Province and the Ministry of Education, Intelligent Wearable Engineering Research Center of Qingdao, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, Shandong, People’s Republic of China

    Ruidong Xu, Minghua She, Jiaxu Liu, Shikang Zhao, Lijun Qu & Mingwei Tian

  2. College of Textiles and Clothing, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, Shandong, People’s Republic of China

    Hong Liu, Lijun Qu & Mingwei Tian

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  1. Ruidong Xu
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  2. Minghua She
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  4. Shikang Zhao
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  5. Hong Liu
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Contributions

LH, LQ and MT: conceptualization, methodology, and supervision. RX investigation, resources, data curation, and writing. MS, JL, SZ: resources, validation, and software. All authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hong Liu, Lijun Qu or Mingwei Tian.

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Movie showing the fabrication of the Kirigami structure ionic hydrogel (Movie S1)

Movie showing the touching type function of the fabric keyboard. (Movie S2)

Movie showing the pully function of the fabric keyboard. (Movie S3)

Movie showing the game controlling of the strain-sensing sleeve. (Movie S4)

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 4158 KB)

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Xu, R., She, M., Liu, J. et al. Breathable Kirigami-Shaped Ionotronic e-Textile with Touch/Strain Sensing for Friendly Epidermal Electronics. Adv. Fiber Mater. 4, 1525–1534 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-022-00186-z

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