Microphase‐Separated Elastic and Ultrastretchable Ionogel for Reliable Ionic Skin with Multimodal Sensation

Abstract

AbstractBioinspired artificial skins integrated with reliable human‐machine interfaces and stretchable electronic systems have attracted considerable attention. However, the current design faces difficulties in simultaneously achieving satisfactory skin‐like mechanical compliance and self‐powered multimodal sensing. Here, this work reports a microphase‐separated bicontinuous ionogel which possesses skin‐like mechanical properties and mimics the multimodal sensing ability of biological skin by ion‐driven stimuli‐electricity conversion. The ionogel exhibits excellent elasticity and ionic conductivity, high toughness, and ultrastretchability, as well as a Young's modulus similar to that of human skin. Leveraging the ion‐polymer interactions enabled selective ion transport, the ionogel can output pulsing or continuous electrical signals in response to diverse stimuli such as strain, touch pressure, and temperature sensitively, demonstrating a unique self‐powered multimodal sensing. Furthermore, the ionogel‐based I‐skin can concurrently sense different stimuli and decouple the variations of the stimuli from the voltage signals with the assistance of a machine‐learning model. The ease of fabrication, wide tunability, self‐powered multimodal sensing, and the excellent environmental tolerance of the ionogels demonstrate a new strategy in the development of next‐generation soft smart mechano‐transduction devices.