Laser-programmed stiffness and interfaces for textile hybrid electronics

Permeable textiles show great potential for daily wearable electronics. As crucial electronic components, rigid chips suffer from modulus mismatch with elastic textile substrates, hindering the development of stretchable hybrid electronics. Herein, we report laser-programmed textile hybrid electronics (LPTHE) featuring seamless integration of wires and chips onto laser-programmed textiles (LPTs). Through selective and controllable laser-polymer interaction, LPTs are tailored with gradient stiffness and interfacial affinities. The laser-pretreated regions exhibit a modulus increase ranging from 2.7-fold to 14.9-fold, while maintaining permeability and biological safety. Such LPT provides stretch stability to LPTHE, creating strain isolation between rigid chips and elastic textiles, while also protecting wires on textiles from disconnection and cross-layer short circuits. We demonstrate an LPTHE screen with 5 × 5 light-emitting diodes displaying variable patterns under deformation. Additionally, an untethered stretchable LPTHE patch continuously monitors four health parameters during exercise. The proposed strategy bridges the gap between hybrid electronics and elastic daily textiles. The authors develop textile electronic substrates with tailored stiffness and interfacial affinities by selective and controllable laser-matter interaction, addressing the mechanical mismatch between hybrid electronics and elastic textiles.