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Abstract Recent advancements in wearable photonic sensors have marked a transformative era in healthcare, enabling non‐invasive, real‐time, portable, and personalized medical monitoring. These sensors leverage the unique properties of light toward high‐performance sensing in form factors optimized for real‐world use. Their ability to offer solutions to a broad spectrum of medical challenges – from routine health monitoring to managing chronic conditions, inspires a rapidly growing translational market. This review explores the design and development of wearable photonic sensors toward various healthcare applications. The photonic sensing strategies that power these technologies are first presented, alongside a discussion of the factors that define optimal use‐cases for each approach. The means by which these mechanisms are integrated into wearable formats are then discussed, with considerations toward material selection for comfort and functionality, component fabrication, and power management. Recent developments in the space are detailed, accounting for both physical and chemical stimuli detection through various non‐invasive biofluids. Finally, a comprehensive situational overview identifies critical challenges toward translation, alongside promising solutions. Associated future outlooks detail emerging trends and mechanisms that stand to enable the integration of these technologies into mainstream healthcare practice, toward advancing personalized medicine and improving patient outcomes. 

Abstract Diverse and adaptable modes of complex motion observed at different scales in living creatures are challenging to reproduce in robotic systems. Achieving dexterous movement in conventional robots can be difficult due to the many limitations of applying rigid materials. Robots based on soft materials are inherently deformable, compliant, adaptable, and adjustable, making soft robotics conducive to creating machines with complicated actuation and motion gaits. This review examines the mechanisms and modalities of actuation deformation in materials that respond to various stimuli. Then, strategies based on composite materials are considered to build toward actuators that combine multiple actuation modes for sophisticated movements. Examples across literature illustrate the development of soft actuators as free‐moving, entirely soft‐bodied robots with multiple locomotion gaits via careful manipulation of external stimuli. The review further highlights how the application of soft functional materials into robots with rigid components further enhances their locomotive abilities. Finally, taking advantage of the shape‐morphing properties of soft materials, reconfigurable soft robots have shown the capacity for adaptive gaits that enable transition across environments with different locomotive modes for optimal efficiency. Overall, soft materials enable varied multimodal motion in actuators and robots, positioning soft robotics to make real‐world applications for intricate and challenging tasks. 

Abstract Wearable sweat sensors have the potential to revolutionize precision medicine as they can non‐invasively collect molecular information closely associated with an individual's health status. However, the majority of clinically relevant biomarkers cannot be continuously detected in situ using existing wearable approaches. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are a promising candidate to address this challenge but haven't yet gained widespread use due to their complex design and optimization process yielding variable selectivity. Here, QuantumDock is introduced, an automated computational framework for universal MIP development toward wearable applications. QuantumDock utilizes density functional theory to probe molecular interactions between monomers and the target/interferent molecules to optimize selectivity, a fundamentally limiting factor for MIP development toward wearable sensing. A molecular docking approach is employed to explore a wide range of known and unknown monomers, and to identify the optimal monomer/cross‐linker choice for subsequent MIP fabrication. Using an essential amino acid phenylalanine as the exemplar, experimental validation of QuantumDock is performed successfully using solution‐synthesized MIP nanoparticles coupled with ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy. Moreover, a QuantumDock‐optimized graphene‐based wearable device is designed that can perform autonomous sweat induction, sampling, and sensing. For the first time, wearable non‐invasive phenylalanine monitoring is demonstrated in human subjects toward personalized healthcare applications.