Skin-like body sensors have important applications in soft-bodied intelligent robots, electronic skins, and medical health monitoring.

Wide temperature tolerance and superior mechanical properties are highly required for composite hydrogels in electronic applications such as electronic skins and soft robotics. In this work, a unique polyacrylamide-based and double-network hydrogel system is designed and fabricated by introducing graphene oxide and glycerol to improve mechanical properties as well as antifreezing and antiheating properties. Maximum stress of the graphene oxide-incorporated hydrogel increases rapidly to 500.0 kPa which is much higher than that of polymetric acrylamide/carboxymethylcellulose sodium hydrogel (281.7 kPa), probably due to the inhibition from graphene oxide in generation and propagation of cracks. With constantly adding glycerol, total elongation and antifreezing and heating properties of the composite hydrogels increase gradually. Especially, sample with 20 vol % of glycerol not only shows stable conductivity and wide temperature tolerance (-50 to 50 °C) but also has ideal strength-toughness match (597.6 kPa and 1263.4%), suggesting that synergistic effect of different layers in the asymmetric structure plays an active role in improvement of mechanical properties.

In this study, a series of gelatin/silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) composite hydrogels are prepared for the first time through the facile in situ formation of AgNPs. AgNPs, which are formed by reducing Ag⁺ using dopamine-conjugated gelatins. These can simultaneously crosslink gelatin molecules, thus generating three-dimentional and porous hydrogels. The gelation time and pore sizes of these composite hydrogels can be controlled by controlling the feeding concentration of AgNO₃ and weight content of gelatin in water, respectively. The feeding concentration of AgNO₃ also has an effect on the equilibrium swelling ratio of the hydrogels. Moreover, these composite hydrogels, with a controllable gelation time and in situ forming ability, exhibit good adhesive properties and can be used as drug-release depots.

Pb(II) ion-imprinted micro-porous particles were prepared from the ionic complexes formed between vinyl pyridine functional monomers and template Pb(II) ions. The self-assembled Pb(II)/monomer complex was suspension polymerized in the presence of divinylbenzene cross-linker. The prepared micro-particles were 400∼600 μm in size. Their chemical and physical structures, morphologies, and adsorption capacity were analyzed by energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDX) Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis, scanningelectron microscopy (SEM), and atomic adsorption spectroscopy (AAS). The adsorption capacity of the imprinted polymer for the Pb(II) template ions was significantly affected by the initial concentration and the pH of the feed solution. Adsorptionis rapid in the first 1 h, after which it slowly increases to equilibrium. The imprinted particles showed high selectivity for lead ions; the adsorption capacity for the Pb(II) ions, 28 mg g⁻¹ polymer, was much higher than those for other metal ions such as Ni(II)Zn(II), Fe(II), or Cd(II). The imprinted particles maintain high standards of their adsorption ability after 10 repeated uses.