SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-026-4337-2
Silica aerogels are recognized as leading super-insulating materials due to their ultralow thermal conductivity, yet their intrinsic brittleness and poor processability restrict practical deployment in complex industrial and extreme environments. This study introduces a macro-scale 'stiff–soft' synergistic strategy, combining a macroscopically processable, soft-and-tough framework as the load-bearing component with hard-and-brittle polymethylsilsesquioxane (PMSQ) aerogels as the insulating component. A pressure-driven assembly process enables viscosity-tunable PMSQ gel inks to be controllably infused into various hollow frameworks, including honeycomb panels, wheat straws, and hollow fibers. Guided by a modified Hagen–Poiseuille model, ink viscosity is precisely matched to the geometric parameters of the hollow structures. The resulting composites achieve compressive strength of 2.5 MPa, flexural strength of 6.25 MPa, and tensile strength of 40 MPa, while maintaining excellent thermal insulation. This versatile and scalable approach offers a new design paradigm for mechanically adaptive silica aerogel composites in thermal management applications.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2025•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-3372-6
Multi-point sensing is critical for accurate and complete health monitoring in wearable technology, yet current electronic sensors struggle to achieve robust multi-point sensing across the human body. This work presents distributed sensing in clothing via interlocking integration of an elastic strain sensor yarn for smart healthcare. The double-covered elastic strain sensor yarn exhibits a stretchability of up to 170% and a gauge factor of 414, and is seamlessly integrated into clothing to form a durable sensor-clothing interlocking structure. The resulting sensor-integrated fabric is breathable, washable, and abrasion-resistant. A wearable respiratory monitoring belt was developed for assessing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), with sensing data comparable to commercial portable devices. Furthermore, smart clothing with distributed sensing was developed to monitor motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), achieving a high accuracy of 96.67% as confirmed by deep learning algorithms. These results demonstrate promising potential for wearable healthcare systems, addressing the limitations of rigid, fixed-position sensors and thin-film devices that suffer from poor wearability and discomfort when multiple units are integrated.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2025•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-3426-8
Muscle contraction generates both biomechanical force myography (FMG) and bioelectrical electromyogram (EMG) signals, yet simultaneous acquisition remains challenging due to disparate sensing modalities and interface stability issues. This work presents a four-layered all-fibrous multimodal sensor patch (FMSP) integrating a micro-hump structured pressure sensor and an adhesive electrophysiological electrode. The pressure sensor achieves a sensitivity of 148.1 kPa⁻¹ over a broad range of 0.054–200 kPa, while the electrode maintains a skin adhesion strength of 67.6 kPa, ensuring low interface impedance and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 21.8 dB for EMG, surpassing commercial gel electrodes. The FMSP enables synchronous monitoring of FMG and EMG during arm movements, discriminating bending angles and lifted weights. This platform addresses the bottleneck of single-modality muscle assessment, offering a dual-signal strategy for muscle fatigue detection and human-machine interfaces. The all-fibrous architecture, leveraging silk fibroin and conductive materials, provides a scalable route for wearable physiological monitoring with enhanced signal fidelity and user comfort.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2025•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-3521-7
Hydrogel optical fibers have gained widespread use in signal sensing due to their high sensitivity, non-toxic light-sensing capabilities, and rapid responsiveness. However, different stimuli within the body (e.g., compression, temperature changes, and pH variations) can produce similar effects on their sensing signals, making it challenging to decouple these overlapping signals. Herein, we report a programmable hydrogel optical fiber (PHOF) assembled from various hydrogel-based sensors, where structural reconfiguration is enabled by imine bonding. The PHOF was fabricated using a template-assisted method to ensure structural homogeneity among functional units, resulting in a more uniform structure after subsequent assembly and splicing with minimal impact on optical attenuation (optimal light attenuation: 1.54 ± 0.04 dB/cm). By introducing distinct functional phases, we successfully constructed a multi-responsive sensor capable of detecting stress, temperature, and pH. The development of PHOF based on dynamic covalent bonding offers a strategy for designing smart materials and multiplexed sensors with user-defined functions, holding great promise for significant applications in complex signal sensing.