Wearable Medical Devices
The current trend in the design of wearable and skin-mountable sensors is to combine functional nanomaterial (e.g., nanowires, flakes, nanotubes, and nanoparticles) with flexible and stretchable polymers in the form of nanocomposites. In fact, nanomaterials serve as sensing elements while polymers are employed as support materials thanks to their flexibility, stretchability, and human friendliness. Our group concentrates on nanocomposites-based flexible sensors for diverse applications including human motion detection, personalised healthcare, and soft robotics.
References:
Amjadi et al., ACS Nano, 2014, 8, 5154.
Amjadi et al., Advanced Functional Materials, 2016, 26, 1678.
Soft Robotics
Compared to their rigid counterparts, soft robots offer safe and facile interaction with the human body and soft biological materials. They also can adapt their body shape to obstacles in unpredictable environments. Flexible sensors and actuators are the key components of soft robots, enabling them to propel and sense the surrounding environment, respectively. Our group advances the design and fabrication of programmable and stimuli-responsive soft actuators, together with their integration with flexible sensors towards multifunctional soft machines.
References:
Amjadi et al., Advanced Science, 2018, 5, 1800239.
Amjadi et al., ACS Nano, 2016, 10, 10202.
Bioinpsired Structures & Materials
Nature provides plenty of inspiration for the development of smart materials and intelligent systems. For instance, spiders can sense extremely small mechanical vibrations through their crack-shaped slit organs. Geckos can adhere to smooth and rough surfaces with their adhesive pads consisting of dense arrays of fine hairs or starfishes that stick to complex underwater surfaces by chemical glue secretion. Inspired by such biological systems, we seek to design high-performance wearable sensors, soft robots, and skin adhesives.
References:
Amjadi et al., Advanced Materials, 2017, 29, 1701353.
Amjadi et al., ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2016, 8, 5618.
Digital Manufacturing of Soft Machines
Despite notable progress on the fabrication of individual soft sensors, actuators, energy storage and harvesting devices, and electronic circuits, compact and reliable packaging of all these components in an entirely flexible format remains challenging largely due to the complexity of the manufacturing process. Our group focuses on digital manufacturing techniques such as laser micromachining, 3D printing, and inject printing to facilitate the transfer of large-area computer-aided designs into low-cost and robust multifunctional soft systems.
Reference:
Mousavi et al., Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2022, 10, 13673 .