Chemical and engineering approaches to enable organic field-effect transistors for electronic skin applications.

TLDR: Progress to date suggests that OFETs may be integrated within a single substrate to function as an electronic mimic of human skin, which could enable a large range of sensing-related applications from novel prosthetics to robotic surgery.

Abstract: Skin is the body’s largest organ and is responsible for the transduction of a vast amount of information. This conformable material simultaneously collects signals from external stimuli that translate into information such as pressure, pain, and temperature. The development of an electronic material, inspired by the complexity of this organ is a tremendous, unrealized engineering challenge. However, the advent of carbon-based electronics may offer a potential solution to this long-standing problem.In this Account, we describe the use of an organic field-effect transistor (OFET) architecture to transduce mechanical and chemical stimuli into electrical signals. In developing this mimic of human skin, we thought of the sensory elements of the OFET as analogous to the various layers and constituents of skin. In this fashion, each layer of the OFET can be optimized to carry out a specific recognition function. The separation of multimodal sensing among the components of the OFET may be considered a “divide and...