Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2010 Mar 18;11(1):014107.
doi: 10.1088/1468-6996/11/1/014107. eCollection 2010 Feb.

Conducting polymer-hydrogels for medical electrode applications

Rylie A Green  1 , Sungchul Baek  1 , Laura A Poole-Warren  1 , Penny J Martens  1
Affiliations
Review

Conducting polymer-hydrogels for medical electrode applications

Rylie A Green et al. Sci Technol Adv Mater. .

Abstract

Conducting polymers hold significant promise as electrode coatings; however, they are characterized by inherently poor mechanical properties. Blending or producing layered conducting polymers with other polymer forms, such as hydrogels, has been proposed as an approach to improving these properties. There are many challenges to producing hybrid polymers incorporating conducting polymers and hydrogels, including the fabrication of structures based on two such dissimilar materials and evaluation of the properties of the resulting structures. Although both fabrication and evaluation of structure-property relationships remain challenges, materials comprised of conducting polymers and hydrogels are promising for the next generation of bioactive electrode coatings.

Keywords: biomaterials; conducting polymers; hybrid materials; hydrogels; neural electrodes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conducting polymer (polypyrrole) structure defined by conjugated backbone and doped with ionic species A.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Typical monomer structures used to fabricate (i) Poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene), (ii) Poly(hydroxymethyl-3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) and (iii) Poly(3-alklythiophene).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Typical fabrication routes used to produce CP-hydrogels: (A) Templated CP-hydrogels; (B) CPs deposited within a hydrogel matrix and (C) CP-hydrogels formed from mixed precursors—either simultaneously or in a two-step process.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sample SEM images at 1000× magnification: (A) Bare Pt electrode, (B) PEDOT/pTS coated Pt electrode, (C) PEDOT/pTS/NGF coated Pt electrode [11].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Green R A, Lovell N H. and Poole-Warren L A. Biomaterials. 2009;30:3637. doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2009.03.043. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Green R A, Lovell N H. and Poole-Warren L A. Acta Biomater. 2010;6:63. doi: 10.1016/j.actbio.2009.06.030. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Abidian M R. and Martin D C. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2009;19:573. doi: 10.1002/adfm.200801473. - DOI
    1. Abidian M R. and Martin D C. Biomaterials. 2008;29:1273. doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2007.11.022. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wilks S J, Richardson-Burn S M, Hendricks J L, Martin D C. and Otto K J. Front. Neuroeng. 2009;2:7. doi: 10.3389/neuro.16.007.2009. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources