Magneto-Induced Janus Adhesive-Tough Hydrogels for Wearable Human Motion Sensing and Enhanced Low-Grade Heat Harvesting

Janus hydrogels with different properties on the two surfaces have considerable potential in the field of material engineering applications. Various Janus hydrogels have been developed, but there are still some problems, such as stress mismatch caused by the double-layer structure and Janus failure caused by material diffusion in the gradient structure. Here, we report a Janus adhesive-tough hydrogel with polydopamine-decorated Fe3O4 nanoparticles (Fe3O4@PDA) at one side induced by magnetic field to avoid uncontrollable material diffusion in the cross-linking polymerization of acrylamide with alginate-calcium. The magneto-induced Janus (MIJ) hydrogel has an adhesive surface and a tough bulk without an obvious interface to avoid stress mismatch. Due to the intrinsic dissipative matrix and the abundant catechol groups on the adhesive surface, it shows strong adhesion onto various substrates. The MIJ hydrogel has high sensitivity (GF = 0.842) in detecting tiny human motion. Owing to the synergy of Fe3O4@PDA-enhanced interfacial adhesion and heat transfer, it is possible to quickly generate effective temperature differences when adhering to human skin. The MIJ hydrogel achieves a Seebeck coefficient of 13.01 mV·K–1 and an output power of 462.02 mW·m–2 at a 20 K temperature difference. This work proposes a novel strategy to construct Janus hydrogels for flexible wearable devices in human motion sensing and low-grade heat harvesting.