Stretchable liquid metal based biomedical devices

Abstract

Pursuit of improved living quality has stimulated great demand for high-performance conformal healthcare devices in modern human society. However, manufacturing of efficient, comfortable and stretchable biomedical apparatus faces huge challenges using traditional materials. Liquid metals (LMs) show remarkable potential to solve this problem due to their extraordinary biocompatibility, stretchability, thermal and electrical conductivity. In recent years, tremendous explorations have attempted to make stretchable biomedical devices with LMs. Herein, we review the stretchable LM-based biomedical devices on the topics of disease treatment and human function augmenting. The representative and up-to-date neural interfaces, alloy cement, e-vessels, soft heaters, exoskeletons, and e-skins are summarized. The existing issues of LMs applied for biomedical devices are also discussed. This review can provide guidance for the follow-up research in LM-based biomedical devices.