image: A polymer modification method utilizing monoamine grafting, which markedly enhances the piezoelectric properties of the graft polymer.
Credit: ©Science China Press
Piezoelectric technology is critical for flexible devices like wearable health trackers and small energy harvesters, with core polymer components converting body movement, pressure, or vibrations into electrical signals. A long-standing challenge remains: most commonly used polymers today offer limited responsiveness, while a handful of high-performance alternatives often require complex and harsh processing techniques—hindering large-scale production.
A team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) has solved this key problem for piezoelectric-based smart wearables: creating a material that’s both highly responsive and easy to mass-produce.
The HUST team’s novel design? They took a common polymer used in piezoelectric devices and gave it an "upgrade"—adding small organic molecules in the right spots. Unlike old methods that focused on one narrow way to boost performance, this "tweak" creates tiny, controlled local disorder in the polymer’s structure, making it much better at converting movement into electrical signals—like turning a basic radio antenna into a high-gain one that picks up signals more clearly.
Best of all, they made the "upgraded" polymer using a simple process: mixing the ingredients in a solution, pouring it onto a surface, and letting it dry—sort of like making a batch of homemade paper. This method allows them to create uniform films as big as A4 paper, with consistent quality across the whole sheet.
“In the world of piezoelectric wearables, it remains challenging to achieve highly responsive material that is scalable for large-scale fabrication—our upgraded polymer overcome this challenge,” said Professor Yang Liu, who led the study. “This simple, scalable method turns lab breakthroughs into technology that can actually be used in the piezoelectric-based smart watches, health monitors, and energy harvesters people use every day.”
Next, the team plans to test more types of "tweaks" and polymers to further optimize the material’s performance, with the goal of using it in more piezoelectric devices—from medical monitors to lightweight industrial sensors.
Journal
Science Bulletin