Flexible organic transistors for neural activity recording

Abstract

Flexible electronics capable of interacting with biological tissues, and acquiring and processing biological information, are increasingly demanded to capture the dynamic physiological processes, understand the living organisms, and treat human diseases. Neural interfaces with a high spatiotemporal resolution, extreme mechanical compliance, and biocompatibility are essential for precisely recording brain activity and localizing neuronal patterns that generate pathological brain signals. Organic transistors possess unique advantages in detecting low-amplitude signals at the physiologically relevant time scales in biotic environments, given their inherent amplification capabilities for in situ signal processing, designable flexibility, and biocompatibility features. This review summarizes recent progress in neural activity recording and stimulation enabled by flexible and stretchable organic transistors. We introduce underlying mechanisms for multiple transistor building blocks, followed by an explicit discussion on effective design strategies toward flexible and stretchable organic transistor arrays with improved signal transduction capabilities at the transistor/neural interfaces.