Skin-Friendly and Wearable Iontronic Touch Panel for Virtual-Real Handwriting Interaction

Touch panels are deemed as a critical
platform for the future of
human–computer interaction and metaverse. Recently, stretchable
iontronic touch panels have attracted attention due to their superior
adhesivity to the human body. However, such adhesion can not be named
“real wearable”, leading to discomfort for the wearer,
such as rashes or itching with long-time wearing. Herein, a skin-friendly
and wearable iontronic textile-based touch panel with highly touch-sensing
resolution and deformation insensitivity is designed based on an in-suit
growing strategy. This textile-based touch panel endows excellent
interfacial hydrophilic and biocompatibility with human skin by overcoming
the bottlenecks of the hydrogel-based uncomfortable sticky touch interface
and low mechanical behavior. The developed touch panel enables handwriting
interaction with good mechanical capacity (114 MPa), nearly 4145 times
higher than pure hydrogel. More importantly, our touch panel possesses
intrinsic insensitivity to wide external loading from the silver fiber
(<0.003 g) to even heavy metal block (>10 kg). As proof of concept,
the textile-based iontronic touch panel is applied to handwriting
interaction, such as a flexible keyboard and wearable sketchpad. This
iontronic touch panel with skin-friendly and wearable qualitities
is helpful for next-generation wearable interaction electronics.