Edible Electronics: The Vision and the Challenge

Many forward-looking biomedical, pharmaceutical, and food industry technologies have limited applications owing to the lack of crucial factors: balance of safety and reliability, cost-efficiency, and suitability for self-healthcare monitoring. The newly minted field of edible electronics, while at an embryonic stage, is creating great scientific resonance by envisioning a technology which is safe for ingestion, environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and degraded within the body after performing its function, either digested or even metabolized. Yet there is no shared approach, and the field is currently unified only by the use of food-derived or edible synthetic functional materials. In order to help shape the field more consistently, the main ideas and perspectives that have been proposed in the recent past are critically curated, underlining what edible electronics is and will be in the future according to the vision. Long-term opportunities in terms of environmentally friendly smart technologies, remote healthcare monitoring, and the formidable challenges ahead are discussed, covering major issues with respect to safety, materials approval, processing, power supply, communication, and human body interaction. A key point in moving toward such a vision is a strong interdisciplinary cooperation, which is highly encouraged.