Chinese team creates ‘lifelike’ hydrogel that changes shape for smart devices
Light-activated hydrogel that can evolve with living tissue may ultimately help make more flexible brain-computer interfaces and robots
Inspired by living organisms, the team created a light-triggered system called STERS, which uses liquid metal particles to generate slow, self-sustaining chemical reactions that allow a hydrogel to change its structure over time.
“This novel approach enables programmable, lifelike morphological evolution in hydrogels, spanning microscopic to macroscopic scales, minutes to weeks, and single to multiple transformation cycles,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Matter on September 4.
