Flexible, stretchable electronic devices will help monitor athletes on the field, take medical monitoring away from the hospital bedside, and make portable electronics more comfortable—perhaps even wearable. But to do anything at all, they need a power source. Now researchers have demonstrated a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can be stretched by as much as 300 percent.
Since 2011, researchers led by John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have demonstrated stretchable versions of just about every electronic component—circuits, sensors, electrodes, light-emitting diode arrays, and more. Rogers’s goal, in his lab and at his startup company, MC10 of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to make high-performance, comfortable, wearable health monitors. These electronics devices might go on clothing, attach directly to the skin in the form of a temporary tattoo, or even fit inside the body, for example on the surface of the beating heart. For all such applications, stretchiness is vital.
To read the full, original article click on this link: University of Illinois Researchers Create a Battery That Stretches to Three Times Its Normal Size | MIT Technology Review
