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Abstract Hydrogels are considered as promising materials for human‐machine interfaces (HMIs) owing to their merits of tailorable mechanical and electrical properties; nevertheless, it remains challenging to simultaneously achieve ultrasoftness, good mechanical robustness and high sensitivity, which are the pre‐requisite requirements for wearable sensing applications. Herein, for the first time, this work proposes a universal phase‐transition‐induced bubbling strategy to fabricate ultrasoft gradient foam‐shaped hydrogels (FSHs) with stop holes for high deformability, crack‐resistance and sensitive conformal HMIs. As a typical system, the FSH based on polyacrylamide/sodium alginate system shows an ultralow Young's modulus (1.68 kPa), increased sustainable strain (1411%), enhanced fracture toughness (915.6 J m −2 ), improved tensile sensitivity (21.77), and compressive sensitivity (65.23 kPa −1 ). The FSHs are used for precisely acquiring and identifying gesture commands of the operator to remotely control a surgical robot for endoscopy and an electric ship in a first‐person perspective for cruising, feeding crabs and monitoring the environmental change in real‐time.
Hui et al. (Thu,) studied this question.