Abstract
Biosensors based on organic field-effect transistors can offer mechanical flexibility, stretchability and operational stability for conformal on-skin monitoring. However, bending, stretching, moisture and temperature changes can lead to signal artefacts and drifts. Here we report skin-like drift-free biosensors based on stretchable diode-connected organic field-effect transistors. Our approach relies on capacitive coupling and the subtraction of interference signals using two extended gates functionalized separately with target and reference bioreceptors. It reduces signal distortion by up to two orders of magnitude compared with an unconnected organic field-effect transistor, despite changes in the sampling environment, including bias stress instability, uniaxial strain (up to 100%), compression (up to 50 mN) and temperature variations (25–40 °C). We apply the approach to aptamer-based sensing for cortisol, enzyme-based sensing for glucose and ion-selective membrane-based potentiometric sensing for sodium ions. We also develop a hybrid wearable system, including soft sensors and a flexible printed circuit board, which wirelessly communicates with a smartphone app. We show that the system can perform cortisol sensing from human sweat under acute stress events.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (SENSE-2037304). C. Zhao acknowledges funding from an F32 fellowship from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health (F32EB034156, C. Zhao). R.K.M. was supported by the Department of Defense (DoD) through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Program. A.B. acknowledges the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (grant number DGE-1656518, A.B.) and the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Z.B. is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco investigator and an Arc Institute innovation investigator. Z.B. acknowledges support from the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Ideation and Prototyping Lab and Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR) seed funding. We thank the Bin Lin and Daisy Liu Family Fund for the generous support of the Bao Group’s research at Stanford University. Part of this work was performed at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities (SNSF), supported by the NSF award ECCS-2026822. We thank the Asahi Kasei Corporation for providing SEBS. We thank E. Luis for feedback on the paper and J.-Y. Chang for technical assistance on data collection.
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C. Zhao, J.P. and Z.B. designed the project and experiments. C. Zhao, J.P. and D.M. carried out the experiments and collected the related data. C. Zhao, D.M., Y.Y., W.W. and Q.L. fabricated the OFET biosensors. C. Zhao, J.P., D.M., D.Z., C.W. and C. Zhu carried out the circuit model design and analysis of diode-connected OFETs for biosensing. C. Zhao, J.P., D.M. and Changhao Xu carried out the biosensing tests. Y.Z., X.J. and Z.Y. designed and synthesized the azide compounds (azide, BA and BH). R.K.M. and X.J. designed and synthesized the conjugated polymer (DPPTT). H.L. carried out the scanning electron microscopy imaging. Ying Jiang fabricated the BIND interconnects for the soft-flexible interface. C. Zhao and J.P. conducted and analysed the on-body data. Chengyi Xu and B.S. carried out the laser cutting for the microfluidics. A.B. printed out the 3D resins for encapsulation. L.M., Yuanwen Jiang, S.W., J.S., A.A., E.K. and M.K. helped with the experimental design and device fabrication. C. Zhao, J.P. and Z.B. wrote the paper. All authors reviewed and commented on the paper.
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Zhao, C., Park, J., Maulà, D. et al. Skin-like drift-free biosensors with stretchable diode-connected organic field-effect transistors. Nat Electron 8, 981–993 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01465-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01465-4
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