Biology subjects

Mottini, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Mottini, V..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Skin-conformal electronics for wearable electrogastrography monitoring

Electrogastrography (EGG), a non-invasive method for measuring gastric myoelectrical activity, offers valuable insights into gastrointestinal motility and functional disorders such as gastroparesis and functional dyspepsia. Despite its diagnostic potential, the clinical adoption of EGG has been limited due to its reliance on rigid electrodes and bulky instrumentation, which leads to motion artifacts and poor signal quality, and ultimately reduces patient comfort and restricting data collection to short-duration, stationary settings. To address these limitations, we present FlexEGG, a skin-conformal, flexible electronic system engineered for high-fidelity EGG monitoring in both clinical and real-world environments. The device incorporates a soft, stretchable electrode array specifically designed for the abdominal surface, utilizing a hybrid stretchable conductor composed of conductive polymer, silver nanowires (AgNWs), and polyurethane elastomer, which leads to good skin contact, signal stability, and mechanical conformability. A custom low-noise analog front-end and digital signal processing pipeline enables reliable acquisition of low-frequency, low-amplitude gastric slow waves. Additionally, FlexEGG supports simultaneous electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement, potentially facilitating integrated gut-heart axis monitoring for broader physiological assessment. In this study, we describe the design, implementation, and validation of FlexEGG in multi-channel, long-duration EGG and ECG recordings. Our findings demonstrate its potential as a wearable, non-invasive tool for continuous gastrointestinal electrophysiology monitoring, enabling new opportunities for diagnosing and managing digestive disorders in everyday settings.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2025

Highly Adaptive Conductive Polymer Electronics Enhance Neural Data and Learning Accuracy

Human skin, the bodys largest organ, plays a vital role in sensing and transmitting neuronal, mechanical, and biochemical signals, making it an essential non-invasive interface for health monitoring, rehabilitation, and human-machine interaction. However, aging-related changes, including thinning, increased wrinkling, dryness, and altered collagen structure, significantly impact electrical impedance, conductance, and contact stability, challenging the fidelity and consistency of bioelectronic signal acquisition. Here, we address this gap by developing "AdapSkin," an age-adaptive, skin-mimicking, bio-adhesive, and stretchable polymeric electronic skin interface that seamlessly conforms to diverse skin properties, enabling high-fidelity and high-density electrophysiological recording. The soft electrodes of AdapSkin are composed of an aqueously processed, homogeneously mixed organic nanocomposite with a conductive polymer percolation network, forming a gel-like interface that reduces modulus and enhances skin-electrode contact. The materials platform achieves extraordinary softness and electrical stretchability of up to 1200% through a double-network composite structure. AdapSkin significantly minimizes age-induced variations in interfacial impedance and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), improving signal consistency for neuromuscular assessment, prosthetic control, and rehabilitation applications. Scalable fabrication enables the creation of large-area electrode arrays, which reduces motion artifacts, improves sEMG mapping reliability, and ensures long-term signal stability across various age groups. Machine learning analysis further demonstrates AdapSkins superior accuracy in gesture classification for elderly users, highlighting its potential to enhance prosthetic control, assistive robotics, and rehabilitation for individuals with sarcopenia and neuromuscular decline. By improving signal quality and adaptability in aging populations, AdapSkin advances fair bioelectronic interfaces, fostering more equitable and effective healthcare technologies for age-related conditions.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2025

Mycoelectronics: Bioprinted Living Fungal Bioelectronics for Artificial Sensation

The intelligence of the human biological system is enabled by the highly distributed sensing receptors on soft skin that can distinguish various stimulations or environmental cues, thus establishing the fundamental logic of sensing and physiological regulation or response. To replicate biological perception, two approaches have emerged: artificial nervous systems that utilize soft electronics as biomimetic receptors to convert external stimuli into frequency-encoded signals, and biohybrid solutions that integrate living cells, plants, or even live animals with electronic components to decode environmental cues for life-like sensations. However, most current biohybrid approaches for artificial sensation are based on eukaryotic cells, which suffer from slow growth, stringent culture conditions, environmental susceptibility, and short lifespans, thus limiting their integration into practical wearables or robotic sensory skins. Here, we introduce fungi-based printable "Mycoelectronics", which are created by additive bioprinting of living fungal mycelium networks onto stretchable electronics, as a practical living thermo-responsive sensory platform. This Mycoelectronics approach leverages fungis capacity for rapid biological responsiveness, cultivability with exponential growth, stability and self-healing in ambient conditions, bioprintability for scalable manufacturing, and mechanical flexibility for seamless integration with soft electronics. Critically, we discovered that the thermal responsiveness of the fungal network arises from intrinsic cellular processes--specifically, heat-induced vacuole remodeling and fusion, which modulate ionic transport and thus the electrical conductivity of the mycelial cells and networks, enabling a rapid temperature response. By bridging the gap between cell biology and soft electronics, the Mycoelectronics device with a living mycelium network functions as a thermal sensation system with rapid response and intrinsic self-healing properties, autonomously restoring sensing capabilities after damage or autonomously establishing sensor pathways in hard-to-reach locations. Furthermore, by integrating fungal thermal sensing with electronic circuits, we established a hybrid bioelectronic reflex arc that can actuate muscles and initiate diverse actions, suggesting promising applications in future neurorobotics and neuroprosthetics.

bioengineering↗