Food-Based Edible and Nutritive Electronics

A new class of electronic materials derived predominantly from natural foods and foodstuffs, with minimal levels of inorganic materials, is developed and studied to build edible electronic components and devices compatible with the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. A “toolkit” of food-based electronic materials, fabrication schemes, basic device components, and functional devices with integrated sensing and wireless signal transmission is reported. These new materials establish the possibility to extend GI electronic devices beyond the ingested nondegradable systems to edible and nutritive systems, in which the described materials may be ingested and assimilated as metabolized nutrients. This study represents a new era of edible electronics with the potential to revolutionize modern biomedical technologies and devices.