Next-Generation Sensors and Smart Biomaterials for Healthcare Applications

Over the past decade, healthcare technologies have undergone a profound transformation, evolving from standalone diagnostic instruments and passive structural materials toward integrated platforms in which sensing, smart materials, and data-driven systems operate in concert to actively monitor, interact with, and respond to the patient. Next-generation sensors now enable rapid, sensitive, and real-time assessment of physiological, biochemical, and pathological parameters, while smart biomaterials, including stimuli-responsive polymers, hydrogels, nanomaterials, and bioactive surfaces, are reshaping the design of diagnostic devices, implantable systems, drug delivery vehicles, and tissue engineering scaffolds. As a result, the focus of healthcare innovation has shifted toward multifunctional platforms capable of combining biosensing, biocompatibility, mechanical flexibility, and therapeutic action to deliver more precise, personalized, and minimally invasive care.



While individual breakthroughs in wearables, biosensors, and responsive materials have attracted considerable attention, the path to clinical impact is inherently multidisciplinary, spanning biosensing, microfluidics, bioelectronics, materials chemistry, surface engineering, and clinical validation. A comprehensive understanding of these intersections, together with strategies to engineer sensors and biomaterials that operate reliably at the biointerface, is essential to overcome current barriers to translation, including sensitivity, selectivity, long-term stability, scalability, reproducibility, biocompatibility, and real-world clinical performance.



This Research Topic aims to advance a deeper understanding of how next-generation sensors and smart biomaterials can be co-designed to address pressing healthcare needs, and to encourage innovation in platforms that bridge sensing, materials, and therapy. What distinguishes this collection is its emphasis on emerging methodological frontiers, including AI- and data-driven design of sensing and material interfaces, flexible and stretchable bioelectronics, point-of-care and lab-on-a-chip diagnostics, and integrated theranostic systems; alongside more established strategies such as electrochemical and optical biosensing, stimuli-responsive hydrogels, bioactive surface chemistries, and biomimetic scaffold design. By integrating these approaches across materials science, biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, electronics, and clinical research, the Topic seeks to set the foundation for next-generation healthcare technologies offering personalized solutions, improved clinical outcomes, and long-term safety in diagnostics, monitoring, drug delivery, and regenerative medicine.



We welcome original research, reviews, mini reviews, and perspectives addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Wearable and implantable sensors and biosensors for continuous health monitoring

- Flexible, stretchable, and skin-conformable bioelectronics

- Electrochemical and optical biosensing platforms for clinical and point-of-care use

- Microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip systems for diagnostics and patient stratification

- Smart hydrogels and stimuli-responsive biomaterials for sensing and therapy

- Bioactive surfaces and engineered biointerfaces for sensors and implants

- Targeted and stimuli-responsive drug delivery systems

- Tissue engineering scaffolds and regenerative biomaterials with integrated sensing

- Wound healing, antimicrobial, and infection-responsive materials

- AI-assisted and data-driven approaches to sensor and material design

- Strategies to overcome regulatory, scalability, and safety challenges for next-generation healthcare devices

- Translational and clinical perspectives on integrated sensing–biomaterial platforms