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The ability to 3D print soft materials with integrated strain sensors enables significant flexibility for the design and fabrication of soft robots. Hydrogels provide an interesting alternative to traditional soft robot materials, allowing for more varied ...
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2021
Hydrogels are among the first materials expressly designed for their use in biomedicine. However, state-of-the-art applications of hydrogels are severely limited because they are typically either too soft or too brittle such that they cannot bear significa ...
Chondrocytes within articular cartilage possess the capacity to perceive and react to signals generated by the typical load-bearing actions of daily life, such as walking or running. Articular cartilage is predominantly oriented toward compression-based fu ...
Many natural materials are structured on different length scales. This structuring often leads to an intricate interplay between soft and stiff components, which significantly improves the fracture toughness of these materials. A class of soft material tha ...
EPFL2022
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Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest because of their biomechanical compatibility. An important feature of deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable materials with high gauge fac ...
Hydrogels are often employed for tissue engineering and moistening applications. However, they are rarely used for load-bearing purposes because of their limited stiffness and the stiffness-toughness compromise inherent to them. By contrast, nature uses hy ...
The drive to develop cartilage implants for the treatment of major defects in the musculoskeletal sys-tem has resulted in a major research thrust towards developing biomaterial devices for cartilage repair. Investigational devices for the restoration of ar ...
ELSEVIER SCI LTD2023
The risk of concussion remains high in snow sports, even with a high helmet adoption rate. Novel helmet designs with enhanced energy dissipation are needed to solve this issue. In this study, helmet liners with bio-inspired honeycomb structures were propos ...
2022
Throughout nature, organisms fabricate a myriad of materials to sustain their lifestyle. Many of the soft materials are composed of water-swollen networks of organic molecules, so-called hydrogels. They generally contribute to the mechanical integrity of t ...
EPFL2022
Despite the development of hydrogels with a wide range of mechanical properties, insufficient adhesion between these materials and biological surfaces limits their use in the biomedical applications. Most recent advancements in highly adhesive hydrogel sys ...