Review highlights advances in flexible optoelectronics for cardiac healthcare

A review paper by scientists at Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences summarized the progress of biointegrated flexible and stretchable optoelectronics for wearable and implantable cardiac healthcare.

The new review paper, published on Oct. 18 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, focuses on the advances in biointegrated flexible and stretchable optoelectronics for wearable and implantable cardiac healthcare systems.

With the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, it is imperative that medical monitoring and treatment become more instantaneous and comfortable for patients. Recently, wearable and implantable optoelectronic devices can be seamlessly integrated into the human body to enable physiological monitoring and treatment in an imperceptible and spatiotemporally unconstrained manner, opening countless possibilities for the intelligent healthcare paradigm.

To achieve biointegrated cardiac healthcare, researchers have focused on novel strategies for the construction of flexible/stretchable optoelectronic devices and systems."

Yunlong Guo, study author, professor at Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Thus, they summarized the advances in wearable and implantable optoelectronic devices for cardiac healthcare. They focused on the stretchable design, device-biological tissue interface design and encapsulation design of biointegrated optoelectronic devices. Then, the authors moved on to the examples of cardiac physiological monitoring, optogenetic and non-genetic stimulation by biointegrated optoelectronic systems.

Looking forward, the development of high-performance intrinsically stretchable optoelectronic materials is of primary importance in the future. Meanwhile, further research on the processing of intrinsically stretchable optoelectronic arrays with high device densities is also an important direction in the future. The key to realizing intrinsically stretchable optoelectronic arrays with high device density is the construction of high-density electrode arrays. This is expected to be achieved by combining photolithography processes or high-resolution printing techniques such as electrohydrodynamic printing. And it is also possible to introduce dynamic self-healing units to repair the charge transport pathways after undergoing repeated strains.

"The improvement of materials science, fabrication processes and integration technologies will address the current challenges and further promote the clinical translation of bio-integrated optoelectronic platforms towards the next-generation smart healthcare terminals," said Li.

Authors of the paper include Cheng Li, Yangshuang Bian, Zhiyuan Zhao, Yunqi Liu and Yunlong Guo.

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFB3609000), the Strategic Priority Research Program of CAS (XDB0520101), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U22A6002, 22173109), the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (YSBR-053), the CAS-Croucher Scheme for Joint Laboratories, the CAS Cooperation Project (121111KYSB20200036).