Wearable tech that’s safe for the body and kind to the environment

The world of wearable technology – such as sensors and energy-producing devices – is expanding, thanks to new research into a unique combination of materials that are flexible, safe to use on or inside the human body, and environmentally friendly.

Dr. Simon Rondeau-Gagné, along with a team of collaborators and graduate students, used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to show that semiconducting polymers and collagen – the main component of human skin – can be combined to create organic devices “that are more efficient, more conformable and specifically…more green as well.”

Collagen provided both the skin-like rigidity and elasticity (or bendability) the researchers were looking for in “a platform that can be integrated with something like the human body,” said Rondeau-Gagné, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Windsor. Incorporating a polyester polymer gave the devices weeks-long stability but also eventual biodegradability. The research results were recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“We want our devices to be stable enough that they can be used, but unstable enough to not end up accumulating and not creating any kind of problems in the environment, such as microplastic pollution,” he said. “We’re concerned about the environmental footprint and what happens when you dispose of these future technologies.”

Rondeau-Gagné says that, now that they shown their materials are flexible and match the performance of devices made from non-biodegradable components, the sky’s the limit in term of possible applications for organic electronics. In the short term, such a device could be attached to plants to measure, for example, leaf growth. “As the leaf grows, the stretchable device could measure that and provide data about various growing conditions in a greenhouse or in the field.”

This research is part of the Agriculture UWindsor Centre of Excellence (AGUWin), an initiative dedicated to advancing agricultural research, skills training, and sustainable practices.

In the longer term, and in the realm of bioelectronics implanted in the human body, Rondeau- Gagné said a small patch could potentially be implanted in the eye of someone with vision impairment to amplify the signal between the eye and the brain and return or recover some ability.

Developing such applications will involve a lot of collaboration with researchers in other fields, he said. “We can provide them with the materials but also with ideas about how we could actually design sensors.”

Going forward, the researchers will continue to use the CLS to gather more information about the materials they’ve developed, their behaviour and how they interact.

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Kulatunga, Piumi, Adam Pillon, Sophia P. McKillop, Benoît H. Lessard, John F. Trant, and Simon Rondeau-Gagné. "Design and Development of Biocompatible, Flexible, and Biodegradable Collagen-Based Organic Field-Effect Transistors." ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2025).  https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.5c03443 

 

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Greg Basky  
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Canadian Light Source
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