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Health care monitoring is an extremely important aspect of human life that can be accomplished using wearable skin-patchable sensors. Upon interfacing with the skin or epidermal surface of the body, the sensing patches can monitor the movements of human parts such joints, legs, and fingers as well as tiny vibrations caused by respiration, blood flow, and heart beat. Wearable skin patches have shown improved promise in monitoring the body temperature and fever in addition to quick measurement of blood pressure and pulse rate along with breathing rate. Sensors can also analyze the sweat contents when in contact with the skin as well as other analytes such as diabetes-based volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and organophosphate nerve stimulating agents. Hence, the sensors can be of immense help in the early prediction of malfunctions of the body organs such as heart and lungs, leading to timely and effective treatment. This review covers different important aspects of skin-patchable sensors including mechanical strength and flexibility, sensitivity, transparency, self-healing, self-cleaning, and self-powering ability as well as their latest applications in medical technology.

Carbon cloths are the important materials composed of woven carbon fibres having the diameters in the range of 5–10 μm. These materials have been investigated for innumerable applications such as supercapacitors (symmetric and asymmetric), batteries, solar cells, and catalysis. They are found to be the best supports as supercapacitive materials by providing high surface area, conductivity and flexibility compared to much widely used substrate materials such as Ni foam and 1D Fe nanowires. High conductivity and surface area of carbon cloths enable ion diffusion and cause decrease in charge transfer resistance, resulting in an increase of specific capacitance of specific electrodes. Several supercapacitive metal oxides, chalcogenides, phosphides, MXenes, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and conductive polymers have been incorporated into carbon cloths to improve their energy storage activity. Further modification of carbon cloth surface via oxidation, doping and by the growth of different nanostructures is also helpful as it increases the electroactive surface area necessary for electrochemical interaction. The present review mainly focuses on the development of flexible supercapacitors using carbon cloth‐based substrate materials. Such flexible supercapacitors can be further utilized for an uninterrupted and steady power supply to wearable and portable electronic devices.

Soil contamination by petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) causes various acute problems such as crop growth, yield, and grain quality. Many Physico-chemical and biological approaches are employed to remove the PHCs from polluted soil. However, some of these approaches are too slow, or ineffective, and/or environmentally un-friendly. Indeed, bioelectrochemical systems (BES) combine biological methods and electrochemistry in the context of a redox reaction. BES is gaining attention from scientists and policymakers as a promising technology for the remediation of soil contaminated with PHCs. This review discusses BES working principles, mechanisms, design configuration, operational parameters, and advances in BES applications to remediate PHCs from contaminated soil efficiently. The role of biosurfactants and biochar in enhancing PHC degradation in soil using BES mediating extracellular electron transfer (EET) and biofilm formation is highlighted. Furthermore, recent innovations in this field, technical and economic challenges and limitations in scaling-up BES, and future per-spectives are discussed. This review suggests that biochar-based single-chamber air-cathode reactors are preferred because of their lower cost compared to the other classic configurations. Additional efforts are needed in the design of BES reactors, soil characteristics, and seasonal variations in BES performance over a long period of operation to improve the efficiency of soil remediation and power production as well as to apply it on a large scale.