Multifunctional Glycerol-Water Hydrogel for Biomimetic Human Skin with Resistance Memory Function.

Biomimetic human skin-like materials with preferably self-healable ability, high sensitivity for external stimuli, and good adhesiveness against diverse substrates under a wide range of temperature, are of great importance in various applications such as wearable devices, human-motion devices, and soft robotics. However, most of the reported biomimetic human skin-like materials lack the memory function, i.e., they cannot memorize the external stimuli once the stimuli disappear. This drawback hinders their applications in mimicking the human skin in real-world. Here a polyacrylamide/Au@polydopamine glycerol-water (GW) hydrogel has been designed to address this challenge. The as-prepared GW-hydrogel exhibits fast self-healable efficiency and good adhesiveness against diverse substrates under a wide range of temperature (from -15 oC to 37 oC). Additionally, our GW-hydrogel also possesses good perceived ability for external stimuli and subtle/large human motions. Most importantly, resistance memory function has been realized for the first time based on our GW-hydrogel. These outstanding properties make it potentially significant in mimicking the human skin in real-world.