Abstract
Hydration and pH monitoring provide clinically relevant information of preventative medicine, disease diagnostics, and patient care is of great importance. However, traditional materials have limited in flexible sensors due to the long-term on-skin health monitoring, which requires high flexibility, biocompatibility, biodegradability, comfortableness, and air permeability. In this paper, micro hydration and pH sensors were integrated on a composite silk fibroin (C–SF) film for real-time health monitoring. The excellent biocompatibility and flexibility of the C–SF film allow long-term non-allergenic and comfortable with skin contact. Moreover, the flexible hydration sensors had high selectivity and sensitivity, which was sensitive to hydration change in skin and insensitive to humidity change. Within the range of hydration from 25 to 65%, the change of the capacitance has a certain linear relationship C = 0.0121 M (%) + 2.9477 where, C is the capacitance value of the hydration sensor, M is the hydration of the artificial skin. In addition, pH response in different phosphate buffered saline (PBS) linearly is increased from 4 to 9. The open-circuit voltage (OCV) is decreased from − 0.023 to − 0.136 mV. Wearable multifunctional sensors potentially allow ‘fit for purpose’ biomedical applications, such as long-term health monitoring and disease alerts.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by 111 project (B16029), Shenzhen Basic Research Program (JCYJ20180306173007696), National Nature Science Foundation (Nos. U1405226), The Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China (No.2016J05135, No.2015J01557) and the Opening Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Xiamen University (No.201704).
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Hou, C., Zhang, F., Chen, C. et al. Wearable hydration and pH sensor based on protein film for healthcare monitoring. Chem. Pap. 75, 4927–4934 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11696-021-01627-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11696-021-01627-6