Topic: Advanced Materials and Design of Flexible Energy Storage for Wearable Healthcare Technologies

Wearable healthcare is  rapidly evolving from intermittent sensing toward continuous, personalized, and increasingly autonomous health monitoring, placing new demands on how energy is stored, delivered, and integrated within wearable systems. Flexible energy storage is emerging as a critical enabler of this transition, where high electrochemical performance must be achieved alongside mechanical adaptability, long-term stability, and compatibility with soft and dynamic environments. Advances in active materials, conductive networks, electrolytes, and interfaces are enabling flexible batteries and supercapacitors with enhanced energy and power capabilities, while rational design of spherical, fiber-shaped, textile-based, thin-film, and three-dimensional architectures offer lightweight, shape-adaptive and distributed power sources. At the same time, maintaining electrochemical performance under repeated deformation has brought electrochemical–mechanical coupling and structural reliability to the forefront. Integrating energy storage with energy harvesting and self-charging strategies is further opening pathways toward autonomous operation  of wearable systems. These developments are shifting flexible energy storage from individual flexible devices toward integrated power solutions tailored to the demands of wearable healthcare.

This Special Topic brings together advances in materials, electrochemical design, mechanically adaptive architectures, and system integration, with particular emphasis on their translation into continuous health monitoring, biointegrated electronics, and energy-autonomous healthcare platforms.

Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to: 

● Advanced materials and electrochemical design:Electrodes, electrolytes, interfaces, and emerging battery and supercapacitor systems for high-performance flexible energy storage;

● Mechanically adaptive energy storage:Spherically designed, fiber-shaped, textile-based, stretchable, thin-film, and three-dimensional architectures with robust electrochemical performance under deformation;

● Integrated and autonomous power systems:Energy storage systems integrated with energy harvesting, self-charging, and multifunctional components for sustained operation;

● Wearable healthcare and bioelectronics:Flexible power sources for continuous physiological monitoring, wearable biosensing, electronic skin, and biointegrated devices;

● Next-generation healthcare platforms:Lightweight, conformal, distributed, and energy-autonomous systems for continuous and personalized healthcare.