Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technologies accelerate the creation of a flawless 3D virtual world to provide frontier social platform for human. Equally important to traditional visual, auditory and tactile sensations, olfaction exerts both physiological and psychological influences on humans. Here, we report a concept of skin-interfaced olfactory feedback systems with wirelessly, programmable capabilities based on arrays of flexible and miniaturized odor generators (OGs) for olfactory VR applications. By optimizing the materials selection, design layout, and power management, the OGs exhibit outstanding device performance in various aspects, from response rate, to odor concentration control, to long-term continuous operation, to high mechanical/electrical stability and to low power consumption. Representative demonstrations in 4D movie watching, smell message delivery, medical treatment, human emotion control and VR/AR based online teaching prove the great potential of the soft olfaction interface in various practical applications, including entertainment, education, human machine interfaces and so on.

The rapid diagnosis of respiratory virus infection through breath and blow remains challenging. Here we develop a wireless, battery-free, multifunctional pathogenic infection diagnosis system (PIDS) for diagnosing SARS-CoV-2 infection and symptom severity by blow and breath within 110 s and 350 s, respectively. The accuracies reach to 100% and 92% for evaluating the infection and symptom severity of 42 participants, respectively. PIDS realizes simultaneous gaseous sample collection, biomarker identification, abnormal physical signs recording and machine learning analysis. We transform PIDS into other miniaturized wearable or portable electronic platforms that may widen the diagnostic modes at home, outdoors and public places. Collectively, we demonstrate a general-purpose technology for rapidly diagnosing respiratory pathogenic infection by breath and blow, alleviating the technical bottleneck of saliva and nasopharyngeal secretions. PIDS may serve as a complementary diagnostic tool for other point-of-care techniques and guide the symptomatic treatment of viral infections.

Thin, soft, and skin-integrated electronic system has great advantages for realizing continuous human healthcare monitoring. Here, we report an ultra-thin, flexible, and garment-based microelectronics powered by sweat-activated batteries (SABs) and applications of powering biosensors and microelectronic systems for real time sweat monitoring. The SAB cell is ultra-thin (1.25 mm) with excellent biocompatibility. The SAB has good electricity output with high capacity (14.33 mAh) and maximum power density (3.17 mW cm⁻²) after being activated by the sweat volume of 0.045 mL cm⁻², which could continuously power 120 light emitting diodes over 3 h. The outputs could maintain stable after repeatable bending. Wireless microelectronics system could be continuously powered by the SABs for 3 h to monitor sweat and physiological information, including sweat Na⁺ concentration, pH, and skin impedance. The reported integrated system provides a potential for solving the power issues of flexible wearable electronics and realizing personalized medicine.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have undergone substantial development and market growth recently. With research focusing on improving control strategies for better user experience, feedback systems, which are vital for operator awareness of surroundings and flight status, remain underdeveloped. Current bulky manipulators also hinder accuracy and usability. Here, we present an enhanced human-machine interface based on skin-integrated multimodal sensing and feedback devices for closed-loop drone control. This system captures hand gestures for intuitive, rapid, and precise control. An integrated tactile actuator array translates the drone’s posture into two-dimensional tactile information, enhancing the operator’s perception of the flight situation. Integrated obstacle detection and neuromuscular electrical stimulation–based force feedback system enable collision avoidance and flight path correction. This closed-loop system combines intuitive controls and multimodal feedback to reduce training time and cognitive load while improving flight stability, environmental awareness, and the drone’s posture. The use of stretchable electronics also addresses wearability and bulkiness issues in traditional systems, advancing human-machine interface design.

Olfaction feedback systems could be utilized to stimulate human emotion, increase alertness, provide clinical therapy, and establish immersive virtual environments. Currently, the reported olfaction feedback technologies still face a host of formidable challenges, including human perceivable delay in odor manipulation, unwieldy dimensions, and limited number of odor supplies. Herein, we report a general strategy to solve these problems, which associates with a wearable, high-performance olfactory interface based on miniaturized odor generators (OGs) with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The OGs serve as the core technology of the intelligent olfactory interface, which exhibit milestone advances in millisecond-level response time, milliwatt-scale power consumption, and the miniaturized size. Empowered by robust AI algorithms, the olfactory interface shows its great potentials in latency-free mixed reality (MR) and fast olfaction enhancement, thereby establishing a bridge between electronics and users for broad applications ranging from entertainment, to education, to medical treatment, and to human machine interfaces.