Stretchy hydrogel with multiple medical applications

Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new type of stretchy hydrogel that can incorporate electronics, and has various potential uses in healthcare.

The research, published in the journal Advanced Materials, describes a hydrogel made up of 90 per cent water along with a small amount of selected biopolymers. The material is designed to mimic soft human tissue, but also to bond strongly to surfaces such as gold, titanium, aluminium, silicon, glass, and ceramic. This allows electronics including LED lights, temperature sensors, and miniature drug delivery systems to be embedded in the gel.

"Electronics are usually hard and dry, but the human body is soft and wet. These two systems have drastically different properties," said Xuanhe Zhao, a professor from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and lead researcher on the project.

"If you want to put electronics in close contact with the human body for applications such as healthcare monitoring and drug delivery, it is highly desirable to make the electronic devices soft and stretchable to fit the environment of the human body. That's the motivation for stretchable hydrogel electronics."