Designed and engineered soft materials for biomedicine and bioelectronics

Bioelectronic devices and components from soft materials form natural interfaces with the human body. Materials and technical challenges associated with functional performance, stability and reliability of integrated soft bioelectronic systems however are common challenges in this field. This symposium brings topics to discuss design strategies for novel soft materials (polymers, supramolecular and biomolecules) with future bioelectronics potential. Additionally, it covers engineering the existing soft materials for advanced biomedical and bioengineering need. Bioinspired interfaces including biomechanics, integrative biomaterials, hierarchical structures, and nanoscale self-assembly will be considered. A significant part is also dedicated to revisit self powered electronics for implantable soft mater bioelectronics. The new insights gathered hold promise for revolutionizing biomedical and bioelectronics applications.

Scope:

Flexible and stretchable bioelectronic devices are expected to provide new opportunities in diverse medical and healthcare applications. Soft materials based bioelectronic devices can be rightly conformally integrated with the human body, help minimize the impedance and maximize the signal-to-noise ratio, and can capture various biosignals from target sites and translate them into electrical signals efficiently. Hierarchical structures found in soft-hard tissue interfaces also provide diverse, functionally graded designs for bioinspired engineering materials. New soft materials as well as engineering of existing soft materials are both of significant interest, so that those operate efficiently in wet body environments. In addition, such devices need supply through unconventional power sources such as from surrounding in-vivo mechanical vibrational and friction for the biointegrated devices, with the ease to store the recorded data, visualizing the collected biosignals, and then subsequently apply feedback therapeutic and tissue regeneration stimulations. The individual devices can be assembled together to form a bioelectronics network that is finally applicable to various medical cases. Advances in the soft materials design of flexible, bioresorbable and stretchable dielectric, conducting and semiconducting materials, have led to more inconspicuous and conformal interfaces with tissues and organs. The scientific community has long been working to identify the potential for soft bioelectronic devices in medicine and in in-vivo energy harvesting for powering electronics, but has faced challenges in identifying materials that are biocompatible, biodegradable as well as bioresorbable and have all of the necessary characteristics to operate effectively in varied cellular and noncellular environments. Nanoscale self-assembly of well-defined soft matter-based nanostructures also hold great promise for revolutionizing biomedical delivery applications. The target of this symposium is to facilitate the sharing and cross-fertilization of ideas in the advancment of the design (experimental and theoretical) of bio responsive soft materials and functionality engineering of soft materials for the development of high performance bioelectronics. At the same time, it is expected to be mutually beneficial for young researchers and students.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium:

• New soft materials as well as their composites: design and synthesis with novel functional properties
• Soft Materials engineering for dielectrics, ferroelectric, piezoelectric, semiconducting and cross breed properties: fundamentals to devices and applications
• Biocompatible, ingestible and bioresorbable soft materials and electronics
• Unconventional energy harvesting materials and devices for implantable bioelectronics
• Soft matter engineering for cellular bioelectronic interfaces
• Advances in nonbio and bio interfacial technology for minimally-invasive soft implants
• Advances in Soft bioadhesives and Soft Stimuli-responsive materials
• Biomimetic Natural Biomaterials: Study the rational design and preparation of biomimetic materials that mimic tissue extracellular matrix properties for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.