Possibilities of Self-Healing UHF RFID Sensor Tags in Biomedical and Bionic Applications

Self-healing functional polymers, composites, and blends have the potential to provide cutting-edge solutions for fully soft and elastic electronics, antennas and sensors, enabling them to spontaneously heal themselves. Recently, we have achieved promising results in fabrication and testing of fully polymeric, stretchable and self-healing ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. It is expected that multifunctional self-healing polymers will have several paradigm shifting applications in biomedicine and bionics, such as self-healing electronic skin (eSkin) and self-healing wireless biomedical implants. In these systems, RFID-based communication methods will provide an important development platform. The work presented in this paper provides proof-of- concept in the development of self-healing antennas, sensors and electronics. In addition to the first prototypes of self-healing tag antennas, we have demonstrated direct attachment of the RFID IC strap to the antenna without any additional adhesives. Future work will focus on improving the self-healing material properties and developing interdisciplinary self-healing sensor applications utilizing RFID-based communication methods. We also discuss the future avenues for self-healing eSkin systems and bionic implants integrating human cells and self-healing polymer for regenerative tissue engineering.