Advancing Wearable Technologies with Hydrogels: Innovations and Future Perspectives

Functionalized hydrogels represent an emerging class of smart materials being explored for advancing next-generation wearable technologies, owing to their flexibility, biocompatibility, stimuli-responsiveness, and tunable properties. This review provides an overview of recent developments in hydrogel-based wearables, highlighting their potential to enhance adaptive, multifunctional, and environmentally sustainable devices and textiles. It begins by examining progress in wearable sensors, energy storage and harvesting, biosignal monitoring, and smart textiles, as well as the associated challenges, including limited battery life, inadequate skin adhesion, user discomfort, and constrained functionality. The review further explores the synthesis, fabrication techniques, properties, and types of hydrogels tailored for wearable technologies, followed by a detailed discussion of their applications in smart batteries, supercapacitors, sensors, nanogenerators, fabrics and hybrid systems. It also highlights integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve designs; enhance performance through real-time monitoring, data analytics, and user interaction; and expand functionality. Also, it analyzes key limitations of current hydrogels-particularly in energy density, dehydration resistance, fatigue behaviour, and large-scale reproducibility-and outlines strategies based on hierarchical material design, sustainable and biodegradable formulations, and standardized testing and regulatory alignment. The review concludes by affirming the role of hydrogel-based technologies in shaping the future of wearable innovations across healthcare, lifestyle, and beyond and outlines promising research directions.