Development of biomedical sensing devices based on stretchable conductive composite material

Aiming at the exploitation of the unique carbon nanotubes (CNT) properties, some recent technological research has been devoted to carbon nanotubes incorporation in both polymeric and metal composite materials. This work too is focused on a particular branch of this wide field; in particular, its purpose is to achieve planar and threedimensional conductor and sensor arrays based on single-walled carbon nanotubes self-assembled on polymeric substrates, so that such sensor arrays can be shaped in a 3D form; and also to understand their grafting mechanism. From the beginning of this work, in spite of the scarce literature reporting freely occurring and stable adhesion of carbon nanotubes, the clear evidence that single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) self-graft onto different polymeric materials immediately appeared to deserve much deeper investigation. One strong reason to investigate this process, is that stable selfgrafting can be obtained without the introduction of reagents or chemical catalysts, but exploiting an adhesion process based only on a thermal cycle close to the melting temperatures of the host polymer matrices. 2 The importance of this work lies in the use of stability, nonreactivity, mechanical strength and extensibility properties of the adsorbed single wall carbon nanotubes agglomerates on different polymers to develop new kinds of flexible and extensible conductive devices which find application in electronics, sensors and medicine. The micro-devices object of this research were used for recording subdural electro-corticograms of rats for a almost nine weeks without showing any of the important inflammatory pathologies which are induced by the implant of other types of electrodes, and which can severely interfere with signal recording. In some animals the implanted was tested up to 20 weeks(experiment still being performed), showing no reduction in basic vital functions; we observed that animals showed no motion alteration and maintained unalerted their natural exploratory behaviour.