John A. Rogers's research while affiliated with Northwestern University and other places

Publications (405)

Article
Full-text available
Soft, wireless physiological sensors that gently adhere to the skin are capable of continuous clinical-grade health monitoring in hospital and/or home settings, of particular value to critically ill infants and other vulnerable patients, but they present risks for injury upon thermal failure. This paper introduces an active materials approach that...
Article
Full-text available
Pressures generated by external forces or by internal body processes represent parameters of critical importance in diagnosing physiological health and in anticipating injuries. Examples span intracranial hypertension from traumatic brain injuries, high blood pressure from poor diet, pressure‐induced skin ulcers from immobility, and edema from cong...
Article
Recently reported winged microelectronic systems offer passive flight mechanisms as a dispersal strategy for purposes in environmental monitoring, population surveillance, pathogen tracking, and other applications. Initial studies indicate potential for technologies of this type, but advances in structural and responsive materials and in aerodynami...
Article
Full-text available
Physically transient forms of electronics enable unique classes of technologies, ranging from biomedical implants that disappear through processes of bioresorption after serving a clinical need to internet-of-things devices that harmlessly dissolve into the environment following a relevant period of use. Here, we develop a sustainable manufacturing...
Article
Full-text available
Low modulus materials that can shape-morph into different three-dimensional (3D) configurations in response to external stimuli have wide-ranging applications in flexible/stretchable electronics, surgical instruments, soft machines and soft robotics. This paper reports a shape-programmable system that exploits liquid metal microfluidic networks emb...
Article
Full-text available
In vivo optogenetics and photopharmacology are two techniques for controlling neuronal activity that have immense potential in neuroscience research. Their applications in tether-free groups of animals have been limited in part due to tools availability. Here, we present a wireless, battery-free, programable multilateral optofluidic platform with u...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: A primary goal of acute stroke rehabilitation is to maximize functional recovery and help patients reintegrate safely in the home and community. However, not all patients have the same potential for recovery, making it difficult to set realistic therapy goals and to anticipate future needs for short- or long-term care. The objective of...
Article
Full-text available
Microsystem technologies for evaluating the mechanical properties of soft biological tissues offer various capabilities relevant to medical research and clinical diagnosis of pathophysiologic conditions. Recent progress includes (1) the development of tissue-compliant designs that provide minimally invasive interfaces to soft, dynamic biological su...
Article
Robots with submillimeter dimensions are of interest for applications that range from tools for minimally invasive surgical procedures in clinical medicine to vehicles for manipulating cells/tissues in biology research. The limited classes of structures and materials that can be used in such robots, however, create challenges in achieving desired p...
Article
Full-text available
Recent progress in soft material chemistry and enabling methods of 3D and 4D fabrication—emerging programmable material designs and associated assembly methods for the construction of complex functional structures—is highlighted. The underlying advances in this science allow the creation of soft material architectures with properties and shapes tha...
Article
Full-text available
Three-dimensional (3D), hierarchical micro/nanostructures formed with advanced functional materials are of growing interest due to their broad potential utilities in electronics, robotics, battery technology, and biomedical engineering. Among various strategies in 3D micro/nanofabrication, a set of methods based on compressive buckling offers wide-...
Article
Full-text available
Flowrate control in flexible bioelectronics with targeted drug delivery capabilities is essential to ensure timely and safe delivery. For neuroscience and pharmacogenetics studies in small animals, these flexible bioelectronic systems can be tailored to deliver small drug volumes on a controlled fashion without damaging surrounding tissues from str...
Article
Full-text available
Nutrients play critical roles in maintaining core physiological functions and in preventing diseases. Technologies for delivering these nutrients and for monitoring their concentrations can help to ensure proper nutritional balance. Eccrine sweat is a potentially attractive class of biofluid for monitoring purposes due to the ability to capture swe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Dynamic shape-morphing soft materials systems are ubiquitous in living organisms; they are also of rapidly increasing relevance to emerging technologies in soft machines, flexible electronics, and smart medicines. Soft matter equipped with responsive components can switch between designed shapes or structures, but cannot support the types of dynami...
Article
Full-text available
Continuous monitoring of vital signs is an essential aspect of operations in neonatal and pediatric intensive care units (NICUs and PICUs), of particular importance to extremely premature and/or critically ill patients. Current approaches require multiple sensors taped to the skin and connected via hard-wired interfaces to external data acquisition...
Article
Implantable bioelectronic devices with drug delivery capabilities have emerged as suitable candidates for biomedical applications focusing on localized drug delivery. These classes of miniaturized bioelectronics offer wireless operation and refillable designs that can be used for repeated animal behavioral studies without restricting their motion....
Article
Animals such as the armadillo and pangolin have natural armor as a mechanical form of protection from predators. Among the several types of armor that exist in nature, structures composed of thin elastomeric substrates with overlapping hard scales can shield underlying soft tissues from physical impacts and localized stresses while maintaining a le...
Article
Full-text available
Wireless, skin-integrated devices for continuous, clinical-quality monitoring of vital signs have the potential to greatly improve the care of patients in neonatal and pediatric intensive-care units. These same technologies can also be used in the home, across a broad spectrum of ages, from beginning to end of life. Although miniaturized forms of s...
Preprint
Full-text available
We diagnosed 63 peripheral nerve injuries in 32 patients who survived severe COVID-19. We combine our latest data with published case series re-analyzed here (106 nerve injuries; 49 patients) to provide a comprehensive accounting of lesion sites. The most common are ulnar (26.0%), common fibular (16.0%), median (10.7%), sciatic (10.7%), brachial pl...
Article
Full-text available
Implantable deep brain stimulation (DBS) systems are utilized for clinical treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and chronic pain. However, long-term efficacy of DBS is limited, and chronic neuroplastic changes and associated therapeutic mechanisms are not well understood. Fundamental and mechanistic investigation, typically accomplishe...
Article
Injectable bioelectronic devices provide programmable drug volume delivery control via flexible electrochemical pumps featuring scalable designs for localized drug delivery experiments involving small animals and future drug delivery in humans, especially for life saving medication. A model for the drug delivery time is established from the ideal g...
Article
Full-text available
Flexible electronic/optoelectronic systems that can intimately integrate onto the surfaces of vital organ systems have the potential to offer revolutionary diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities relevant to a wide spectrum of diseases and disorders. The critical interfaces between such technologies and living tissues must provide soft mechanical c...
Article
Significance Delivery of light for optogenetic stimulation of the brain is challenging, especially in small animals, because of behavioral constraints associated with physical tethering by fiber optic cables. This limitation interferes with some classes of in vivo behavioral experiments and makes others impossible. Additionally, the penetrating pro...
Article
Full-text available
Temporary cardiac pacemakers used in periods of need during surgical recovery involve percutaneous leads and externalized hardware that carry risks of infection, constrain patient mobility and may damage the heart during lead removal. Here we report a leadless, battery-free, fully implantable cardiac pacemaker for postoperative control of cardiac r...
Article
Full-text available
Phototherapy represents an attractive route for treating a range of challenging dermatological diseases. Existing skin phototherapy modalities rely on direct UV illumination, although with limited efficacy in addressing disorders of deeper tissue and with requirements for specialized illumination equipment and masks to shield unaffected regions of...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Tissue-on-chip systems offer important capabilities in engineering of living tissues for diverse biomedical applications in disease model studies, drug screening, and regenerative medicine. Conventional approaches use two-dimensional layouts that cannot suppport interfaces to geometrically complex three-dimensional (3D) tissue construc...
Article
The use of optogenetics to regulate neuronal activity has revolutionized the study of the neural circuitry underlying a number of complex behaviors in rodents. Advances have been particularly evident in the study of brain circuitry and related behaviors, while advances in the study of spinal circuitry have been less striking because of technical hu...
Article
Significance Drug delivery systems with electrochemical actuation offer programmable volume/flowrates in miniaturized form factors for in vivo pharmacological experiments in freely moving animals where flowrate control and delivery time are important. Here, we present an analytical model that accounts for all the problem variables influencing the d...
Article
Full-text available
Natural systems display sophisticated control of light-matter interactions at multiple length scales for light harvesting, manipulation, and management, through elaborate photonic architectures and responsive material formats. Here, we combine programmable photonic function with elastomeric material composites to generate optomechanical actuators t...
Article
Tethered and battery-powered devices that interface with neural tissues can restrict natural motions and prevent social interactions in animal models, thereby limiting the utility of these devices in behavioural neuroscience research. In this Review Article, we discuss recent progress in the development of miniaturized and ultralightweight devices...
Article
Flexible, large-area tactile sensors capable of simultaneously measuring in real time both the normal pressure and the tangential shear stress have many important applications, including those in artificial skin for uses in robotics, medicine and rehabilitation. Previously reported sensors exhibit responses to pressure and shear stress that are cou...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Controlling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic largely depends on scaling up the testing infrastructure for identifying infected individuals. Consumer-grade wearables may present a solution to detect the presence of infections in the population, but the current paradigm requires collecting physiological data continuously and for long p...
Article
Full-text available
Accurate, real-time monitoring of intravascular oxygen levels is important in tracking the cardiopulmonary health of patients after cardiothoracic surgery. Existing technologies use intravascular placement of glass fiber-optic catheters that pose risks of blood vessel damage, thrombosis, and infection. In addition, physical tethers to power supply...
Article
Full-text available
Vibration-based methods can be used effectively to characterize the physical properties of biological materials, with an increasing interest focused on the mechanics of individual, living cells. Real-time measurements of cell properties, such as mass and Young’s modulus, can yield important insights into many aspects of cell growth and metabolism a...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Large channel count surface-based electrophysiology arrays (e.g. µECoG) are high-throughput neural interfaces with good chronic stability. Electrode spacing remains ad hoc due to redundancy and nonstationarity of field dynamics. Here, we establish a criterion for electrode spacing based on the expected accuracy of predicting field poten...
Article
Full-text available
Implantable biomedical devices are rapidly advancing for applications in in vivo monitoring and intervention for human health. A frontier for this area is in electronic implants that function in the body for some period of time matched to an intrinsic body process and then disappear naturally, thereby avoiding the need for surgical extraction. Cont...
Article
Full-text available
Interest in deciphering the fundamental mechanisms and processes of the human mind represents a central driving force in modern neuroscience research. Activities in support of this goal rely on advanced methodologies and engineering systems that are capable of interrogating and stimulating neural pathways, from single cells in small networks to int...
Article
Full-text available
Significance Continuous monitoring of cerebral hemodynamics is critical for safeguarding the healthy neurodevelopment of pediatric patients. This paper introduces a soft, flexible, miniaturized wireless system for real-time, continuous monitoring of systemic and cerebral hemodynamics for such purposes. Clinical studies on pediatric subjects with ag...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Melanoma is attributable to predisposing phenotypical factors, such as having skin that easily sunburns, as well as unprotected exposure to carcinogenic ultraviolet radiation. Despite 20 years of traditional public health media campaigns, young adults with sun sensitive skin consistently reported frequent sunburns. Reducing the proportio...
Article
Objective: High-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) has been utilized extensively in neuromuscular research. Despite its potential advantages, limitations in electrode design have largely prevented widespread acceptance of the technology. Commercial electrodes have limited spatial fidelity, because of a lack of sharpness of the signal, and...
Article
Full-text available
The rigidity and relatively primitive modes of operation of catheters equipped with sensing or actuation elements impede their conformal contact with soft-tissue surfaces, limit the scope of their uses, lengthen surgical times and increase the need for advanced surgical skills. Here, we report materials, device designs and fabrication approaches fo...
Article
Full-text available
Implantable drug release platforms that offer wirelessly programmable control over pharmacokinetics have potential in advanced treatment protocols for hormone imbalances, malignant cancers, diabetic conditions, and others. We present a system with this type of functionality in which the constituent materials undergo complete bioresorption to elimin...
Article
Enzymatic biofuel cell (EBFC)-based self-powered sensors represent an interesting class of biochemical sensors as they obviate the need for external power sources thus enabling device miniaturization. While recent efforts driven by experimentalists illustrate the potential of EBFC-based sensors for real-time monitoring of physiologically relevant b...
Article
Opportunities for quantitative, real‐time monitoring of gases, ions, and biomolecules in the environment and in the human body motivate programs of fundamental and applied research on chemically selective sensors with fast response times. In this context, silicon field‐effect transistors are of considerable interest as label‐free, scalable platform...
Article
Engineered systems that can serve as chronically stable, high-performance electronic recording and stimulation interfaces to the brain and other parts of the nervous system, with cellular-level resolution across macroscopic areas, are of broad interest to the neuroscience and biomedical communities. Challenges remain in the development of biocompat...
Article
Full-text available
Pressures in the intracranial, intraocular, and intravascular spaces are important parameters in assessing patients with a range of conditions, of particular relevance to those recovering from injuries or from surgical procedures. Compared with conventional devices, sensors that disappear by natural processes of bioresorption offer advantages in th...
Article
Full-text available
Combined advances in material science, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering form the foundations of thin, soft electronic/optoelectronic platforms that have unique capabilities in wireless monitoring and control of various biological processes in cells, tissues, and organs. Miniaturized, stretchable antennas represent an essential lin...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past decade, the area of stretchable inorganic electronics has evolved very rapidly, in part because the results have opened up a series of unprecedented applications with broad interest and potential for impact, especially in bio‐integrated systems. Low modulus mechanics and the ability to accommodate extreme mechanical deformations, espe...
Article
Full-text available
Deterministic transformations of 2D patterns of materials into well-controlled 3D mesostructures serve as the basis for manufacturing methods that can bypass limitations of conventional 3D micro/nanofabrication. Here, guided mechanical buckling processes provide access to a rich range of complex 3D mesostructures in high-performance materials, from...
Article
Full-text available
In article number 1908424, Yonggang Huang, John A. Rogers, Yihui Zhang, and co‐workers present an inverse design method for forming 3D surfaces through buckling‐guided transformation of 2D structures. Demonstrations in a variety of target 3D configurations (e.g., flower‐, saddle‐surface‐, waterdrop‐, and rodent‐shapes) suggest this method as a powe...
Article
Long-lasting, high-resolution neural interfaces that are ultrathin and flexible are essential for precise brain mapping and high-performance neuroprosthetic systems. Scaling to sample thousands of sites across large brain regions requires integrating powered electronics to multiplex many electrodes to a few external wires. However, existing multipl...
Article
Full-text available
Self‐assembly of 3D structures presents an attractive and scalable route to realize reconfigurable and functionally capable mesoscale devices without human intervention. A common approach for achieving this is to utilize stimuli‐responsive folding of hinged structures, which requires the integration of different materials and/or geometric arrangeme...
Article
A nervous sweat may seem like an inconvenience, but your body could be releasing important signals. Herein, Gao and colleagues develop a wearable sensor with integrated microfluidics, immunoassays, and electronics for tracking cortisol in sweat—as a biomarker of stress.
Article
Full-text available
The positive or negative value (valence) of past experiences is normally integrated into neuronal circuits that encode episodic memories and plays an important role in guiding behavior. Here, we show, using mouse behavioral models, that glutamatergic afferents from the ventral tegmental area to the dorsal hippocampus (VTA→DH) signal negative valenc...
Article
Transient electronic systems represent an emerging class of technology defined by an ability to physically dissolve, sublime, chemically degrade, disintegrate, or transform in a controlled manner, either spontaneously or through a trigger event. Bioresorbable (or, equivalently, bioabsorbable) electronic devices, as a subset of transient technologie...
Article
Recent advances in the assembly of three-dimensional (3D) structures driven by compressive buckling have provided an opportunity to exploit the capability in a broad range of engineering applications. These include microelectromechanical systems, energy storage, and wearable electronic devices. The occurrence of defects during fabrication and assem...
Article
Significance Monitoring neuronal activity with cell specificity in freely behaving animal models can yield insights into underpinning operating mechanisms of the brain. Dynamics of genetically targeted neuronal populations can be recorded through calcium indicators; however, current tools for such measurements are only available with tethers or lar...
Article
Full-text available
3D structures that incorporate high‐performance electronic materials and allow for remote, on‐demand 3D shape reconfiguration are of interest for applications that range from ingestible medical devices and microrobotics to tunable optoelectronics. Here, materials and design approaches are introduced for assembly of such systems via controlled mecha...
Article
Full-text available
Small animals support a wide range of pathological phenotypes and genotypes as versatile, affordable models for pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases and for exploration of strategies in electrotherapy, gene therapy, and optogenetics. Pacing tools in such contexts are currently limited to tethered embodiments that constrain animal behaviors and e...
Article
Environmental hazards typically are encountered in the gaseous phase; however, selective sensing modalities for identifying and quantitating compounds of interest in an inexpensive, pseudo-real-time format are severely lacking. Here we present a novel proof-of-concept that combines an Air2Liquid sampler in conjunction with an oil-in-water microflui...
Article
Full-text available
Recently introduced classes of thin, soft, skin-mounted microfluidic systems offer powerful capabilities for continuous, real-time monitoring of total sweat loss, sweat rate and sweat biomarkers. Although these technologies operate without the cost, complexity, size, and weight associated with active components or power sources, rehydration events...