Increasing comfort, safety, and durability of future wearable devices

Energy storage devices are integral to powering wearable and implantable electronics such as smart watches and health monitoring devices, but conventional lithium batteries are rigid and heavy, limiting the comfort and flexibility of these devices. Recently, much research has focused on the development of deformable energy storage devices for wearable electronics, which Wang et al. describe in a new paper.

The team provide an overview on recent advances in designing and developing deformable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for wearable and implantable electronics, such as strategies for fabricating devices and the mechanisms behind their performance. The review also discusses the future challenges and prospects of deformable LIBs, especially stretchable ones that have the most direct application for wearable electronics.

“Flexible wearable and implantable electronics are current international frontier research hotspots, and it is extremely critical to develop deformable energy storage devices to match them,” co-author Wen-Yong Lai said.

The review is intended for any researcher who is engaged or interested in deformable energy storage, and the team hopes to inspire these researchers to further progress in the field. For the team, there are many potential research directions for deformable lithium-ion batteries.

“Readers should focus on how to further improve the deformation, energy density, safety, and service life of deformable lithium batteries, and how to achieve efficient integration of deformable batteries and wearable, implantable electronics (which is still in its infancy), while also taking into account comfort and more,” Lai said.

Source: “Deformable lithium-ion batteries for wearable and implantable electronics,” by Shi Wang, Tao Cheng, Yi Zhou Zhang, Xinyi Wu, Shijun Xiao, and Wen-Yong Lai, Applied Physics Reviews (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0117252 .