Stimuli-Responsive Conductive Nanocomposite Hydrogels with High Stretchability, Self-healing, Adhesiveness and 3D Printability for Human Motion Sensing.

Self-healing, adhesive conductive hydrogels are of great significance in wearable electronic devices, flexible printable electronics and tissue engineering scaffolds. However, to design the self-healing hydrogels with multi-functional properties such as high conductivity, excellent mechanical property and high sensitivity remains a challenge. In this work, the conductive self-healing nanocomposite hydrogels based on nanoclay (laponite), multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) and N-isopropyl acrylamide (NIPAM) is presented. The presented nanocomposite hydrogels displayed good electrical conductivity, rapid self-healing and adhesive property, flexible and stretchable mechanical property and high sensitivity to NIR light and temperature. These excellent properties of the hydrogels are demonstrated by 3D bulky pressure dependent device, and human activity monitoring device and 3D printed gridding scaffolds. Good cytocompatibility of the conductive hydrogels was also evaluated with L929 fibroblast cells. These nanocomposite hydrogels have great potential in application of stimuli responsive electrical device, wearable electronics and so on.