Dear Colleagues,

Hydrogels with a water-rich polymer network structure are very similar to the native tissues of humans. Recently, due to their flexibility, biocompatibility, and designability, hydrogels have been widely utilized in various areas such as tissue engineering, wearable devices, and flexible electrodes. Conductive hydrogel is a new kind of burgeoning hydrogel. There are two main solutions: utilization of conductive polymers, such as polyaniline and polypyrrole, and introduction of conductive filler into hydrogels, such as metal nanoparticles, MXene nanosheets, ionic liquids, and inorganic salts. In recent developments, one of the main applications of conductive hydrogels is to prepare wearable electronic devices, especially for flexible strain sensors. The flexible strain sensor can transform external mechanical stimuli into easily detectable electrical signals due to the sensitive variations of resistance, current, and capacitance under an applied force. It shows the great potential applications in the fields of personalized health monitoring, human–machine interfaces, soft robots, etc. Conductive hydrogels are also widely utilized in tissue regeneration, especially for the skin, myocardium, nerve, and bone repairs. The advantage of a conductive hydrogel is that it can provide both physical and electrical properties, in which the former is the unique property of the hydrogel and the latter is the conductivity performed by the conductive materials. Well-designed conductive hydrogels can provide a cell-effective conductive environment to accelerate tissue regeneration. Of course, conductive hydrogels also show promising application prospects in biosensors, solid-state electrolytes, and so on. Therefore, in this Special Issue, we would like to invite researchers to contribute their current forays into this emerging field.

Dr. Qian Feng
Dr. Kunyu Zhang
Dr. Boguang Yang
Guest Editors

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• electroactive polymer
• electroactive hydrogel
• conductive hydrogel
• conductive polymer
• flexible strain sensor
• wearable sensor
• tissue engineering
• biosensor