Silk-Enabled Conformal Multifunctional Bioelectronics for Investigation of Spatiotemporal Epileptiform Activities and Multimodal Neural Encoding/Decoding

Abstract

Flexible electronics can serve as powerful tools for biomedical diagnosis and therapies of neurological disorders, particularly for application cases with brain–machine interfaces (BMIs). Existing conformal soft bioelectrodes are applicable for basic electrocorticogram (ECoG) collecting/monitoring. Nevertheless, as an emerging and promising approach, further multidisciplinary efforts are still demanded for in-depth exploitations with these conformal soft electronics toward their practical neurophysiological applications in both scientific research and real-world clinical operation. Here, clinically-friendly silk-supported/delivered soft bioelectronics are developed, and multiple functions and features valuable for customizable intracranial applications (e.g., biocompatible and spontaneously conformal coupling with cortical surface, spatiotemporal ECoG detecting/monitoring, electro-neurophysiological neural stimulating/decoding, controllable loading/delivery of therapeutic molecules, and parallel optical readouts of operating states) are integrated.