Sensing Materials: Liquid Metal-Enabled Flexible Sensors for Biomedical Applications

Flexible sensors that conformably attach to the soft curvature, can provide precise and sensitive signals for applications of soft robots, wearable devices and human-machine interaction. The soft and flexible features are especially featured in human-related activities, such as human healthcare monitoring, detection of physiological signals and disease diagnosis. Recently, liquid metals have emerged as new generation of function materials to solve complicated biomedical problems. With distinct merits of high conductivity and favorable fluidity, liquid metals are considered as extraordinary candidates among numerous flexible conductive materials. The fluidic nature enables liquid metals with unique injectable and self-healing properties and further inspires many revolutionized electronic patterning techniques. This chapter is dedicated to reviewing liquid metal enabled flexible sensors for biomedical applications, including the featured properties of liquid metals, principles as sensors, emerging fabrication techniques and the typical applications in biomedicine.