A New Generation of Bioinspired Organic Sensors for Smart Applications

Bioinspired organic sensors with excellent flexibility, biocompatibility, sensing performance, and self-adaptability have attracted considerable attention due to their fundamental role in next-generation intelligent sensory systems with simultaneous sensing and processing functions, such as advanced robots, disease diagnosis, the internet of things, human-robot interaction systems, and beyond.

FREMONT, CA: Various areas, including image sensors, medical monitoring, robots, and industrial process monitoring, have extensively used sensors as the link between the outside world and electrical signals. Sensor technologies have faced new challenges in recent years due to materials, sensing mechanisms, and functionalities to deal with complex sensing tasks and high energy consumption. These obstacles have risen from the rapid development of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoTs).

The environmental data gathered from complex environments is preprocessed in the sensory organs before being sent via afferent nerves to the brain for additional processing and decision-making. Integrating organic functional materials with the distinctive device structure will result in bioinspired sensors with intelligent sensing and processing functions, advancing intelligent perception, artificial machine vision, edge computing, and other fields into a new era of advancement. These bioinspired sensors will be inspired by the distinctive materials and well-adapted structures of natural sensory systems.

Organic materials, which are the main building blocks of bio-inspired sensors and are composed of conjugated molecules put together by weak van der Waals forces, have garnered a lot of study interest. Organic materials have superior physical and chemical properties when compared to their inorganic counterparts, making it possible to build and create bioinspired sensors with superior sensing performance, biocompatibility, and elasticity. In particular, flexible bionic devices can be made by directly fabricating organic materials on a variety of soft and flexible surfaces using low-cost deposition techniques like spin-coating, blade coating, roll-to-roll, and inkjet printing.

Notably, electrical relaxation-behaving organic materials can be used to create artificial synapses for high-efficiency neuromorphic computing that goes beyond traditional computing design. Because of these special benefits, organic materials are frequently used to create bio-inspired sensory devices that are the foundation for the creation of cutting-edge intelligent applications. Additionally, designing organic sensors by emulating particular biological structures found in nature will enhance gadget performance and give sensors new capabilities. For instance, the creation of artificial visual sensors that mimic the retina and eyes of humans is made possible by combining organic optical materials with pliable and curved substrates.

In addition, the surface nanostructure and device design of artificial tactile sensing and actuation systems have long drawn inspiration from the flexible and adaptable structure of human skin. A key tactic for improving sensing performance is to customise molecular structures, micro/nanofilm structures of functional materials, and the semiconductor/dielectric contact. Therefore, by detecting, collecting, integrating, memorising, and processing the data in multifunctional perception, bioinspired organic sensors can transfer perception to cognition and reduce redundant and unstructured sensing data while increasing energy efficiency.