Pro-Healing Zwitterionic Skin Sensor Enables Multi-Indicator Distinction and Continuous Real-Time Monitoring

In both artificial electronic and ionic skins, the distinction of multi-stimuli response in a single sensing unit is challenging, due to unavoidable mutual signal interference. Here, a zwitterionic skin sensor system that can continuously monitor and differentiate three-stimuli-responsive information in real-time is designed. This sandwich-structured sensor system is based on a zwitterionic thermo-glucose-sensitive skin-like hydrogel at its upper and lower layers with a middle isolation elastomer layer, enabling monitoring and distinction of temperature, mechanical and glucose information without signal interference: 1) the capacitance of the upper/lower layers as glucose-temperature-insensitive is variable to measure strain; 2) the resistance of the upper hydrogel as glucose-insensitive is variable to measure strain and temperature; and 3) the resistance of the lower hydrogel can detect three indicators. Based on the skin sensor system, a smart wound dressing is developed to pro-heal chronic diabetic wounds and enable continuous real-time monitoring of three indicators-infection, swelling, and blood glucose. This work provides a new method of real-time monitoring and the distinction of multi-stimuli response in a wearable device.