A skin-like, all-in-one hydrogel engineered via a supramolecular entangled network reinforced with hydrogen-bond-associated nanodomains.

A skin-like, all-in-one hydrogel built from a supramolecular entangled network reinforced by hydrogen-bond-associated nanodomains achieves mechanical robustness and dynamic adaptability.

• Why it matters: Artificial skin for bionic robotics and biomedical devices needs hydrogels that match natural human skin’s combined mechanical, functional, and sensing capabilities, which remain difficult to balance.
• What they did: The authors engineered a cooperative network where hydrogen-bond-associated self-assembled nanodomains, polymer-chain entanglement, dynamic electrostatics, and reversible metal-ligand coordination jointly reinforce and tune the material.
• The result: An artificial-skin device made with this hydrogel supports environmental interaction, including respiration monitoring, motion detection, and robotic gripper manipulation, suggesting versatile replication of skin-like multimodal performance.

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