Towards a new class of stimuli-responsive polymer-based materials – Recent advances and challenges

The rapidly-growing field of polymer stimuli-responsive materials (smart materials) resulted in many advances in designing and developing multi-functional systems, novel architectures, and new synthetic routes for many different applications. The smart polymer materials with a wide range of stimuli, such as pH, light, temperature, enzyme, redox, and electric and magnetic fields play an important role in many applications in many disciplines, including nanotechnology, biochemistry, medicine, materials science, polymer science, engineering, etc. This review aims to provide an introduction to stimuli-responsive polymeric materials, their preparation methods, and to discuss the design of various stimulus-responsive materials that are able to provide smart self-healing surfaces, sensors, actuators, and drug delivery systems in response to particular stimuli.