Smart materials: rational design in biosystems via artificial intelligence.

Industry 4.0 encompasses a new industrial revolution in which advanced manufacturing systems are interconnected with information technologies. These sophisticated data-gathering technologies have led to a shift toward smarter manufacturing processes involving the use of smart materials (SMs). The properties of SMs make them highly attractive for numerous biomedical applications. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) enables them to be effectively used in the design of novel biomedical platforms to overcome shortcomings in the current biotechnology industry. This review summarizes recent advances in AI-assisted SMs for different healthcare products. The current challenges and future perspectives of AI-supported smart biosystems are also discussed, particularly with the regard to their applications in drug design, biosensors, theranostics, and electronic skins.

Smart materials-integrated sensor technologies for COVID-19 diagnosis.

After the first case has appeared in China, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose an omnipresent threat to global health, affecting more than 70 million patients and leading to around 1.6 million deaths. To implement rapid and effective clinical management, early diagnosis is the mainstay. Today, real-time reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR test is the major diagnostic practice as a gold standard method for accurate diagnosis of this disease. On the other side, serological assays are easy to be implemented for the disease screening. Considering the limitations of today's tests including lengthy assay time, cost, the need for skilled personnel, and specialized infrastructure, both strategies, however, have impediments to be applied to the resource-scarce settings. Therefore, there is an urgent need to democratize all these practices to be applicable across the globe, specifically to the locations comprising of very limited infrastructure. In this regard, sensor systems have been utilized in clinical diagnostics largely, holding great potential to have pivotal roles as an alternative or complementary options to these current tests, providing crucial fashions such as being suitable for point-of-care settings, cost-effective, and having short turnover time. In particular, the integration of smart materials into sensor technologies leverages their analytical performances, including sensitivity, linear dynamic range, and specificity. Herein, we comprehensively review major smart materials such as nanomaterials, photosensitive materials, electrically sensitive materials, their integration with sensor platforms, and applications as wearable tools within the scope of the COVID-19 diagnosis.