Self-Healing and Antibacterial Essential Oil-Loaded Mesoporous Silica/Polyacrylate Hybrid Hydrogel for High-Performance Wearable Body-Strain Sensing

Abstract

Flexible electronics have aroused great interest over the past few years due to their unique advantages of being wearable and lightweight. Introducing the self-healing function into wearable electronics will contribute to the practical applications of wearable electronics by prolonging the devices' lifetime. In this study, a flexible essential oil (EO)-loaded mesoporous silica (EO@AMS)/polyacrylate hybrid hydrogel with superb self-healing and antibacterial properties was prepared. The prepared hybrid hydrogel was found to have excellent piezoresistive sensing performance, which could be particularly suitable for human vital activity monitoring. Benefiting from the strong ionic bonding and multiple hydrogen bonds between polyacrylate and EO@AMS, the hybrid hydrogel could repair its damaged areas with restored sensing and mechanical properties, which suggested excellent self-healing ability. In addition, this hybrid hydrogel, when applied in wearable devices, was found to have high antibacterial ability owing to the slow release of the lemon EO from AMS to kill bacteria. This promising self-healing and antibacterial hybrid hydrogel shows a promising application in wearable electronics for posture monitoring, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.