An ever-increasing need for wearable and implantable medical devices has driven a demand for electronics that can better interlace with living systems. This has sparked the development of soft or flexible conductive materials and systems and led to a paradigm shift in bioelectronic device research from prior rigid, silicon-based circuits to more adaptable, polymeric electronic devices. While significant progress has been made, such systems have yet to fully-resolve the fundamental mismatches between engineered circuits and the biological systems they connect to. In this paper, we utilized a salt/polyethylene glycol (PEG) aqueous two-phase systems to fabricate programmable hydrogel ionic circuit systems. Here, high-conductivity salt-solution-patterns could be stably encapsulated within PEG hydrogel using PEG/salt phase separation, which could route ionic circuit and enable localized delivery of electrical signals. Such a strategy enabled, for the first time, the realization of designer electronics that can be tailored to display traits fully-matched to those of biological systems. These include transparency, stretchability, a completely aqueous-based connective interface that allows high-resolution routing of electricity between natural and engineered systems, and the ability to reduce damage to biological tissues originating from electrochemical reactions and current injection. We demonstrated the potential utilities of such systems by generating a multi-pixel LED display, mechanically-adaptable circuits, skin-mounted electronics, and localized delivery of electrical stimulation to both in <i>in-vitro </i>neuron cell cultures and <i>in-vivo</i> muscle tissues with reduced adverse effects. Such electronic platforms may form the basis of interlaced, bioelectronic systems in the future.

Designer hydrogel ionic circuits for biologically-matched electronics

256th National Meeting (2018)

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