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Infections are regarded as the most severe complication associated with human health, which are urgent to be solved. Stimuli‐responsive materials are appealing therapeutic platforms for antibacterial treatments, which provide great potential for accurate theranostics. In this review, the advantages, the response mechanisms, and the key design principles of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials are highlighted. The biomedical applications, the current challenges, and future directions of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials are also discussed. First, the categories of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials are comprehensively itemized based on different sources of stimuli, including external physical environmental stimuli (e.g., temperature, light, electricity, salt, etc.) and bacterial metabolites stimuli (e.g., acid, enzyme, redox, etc.). Second, structural characteristics, design principles, and biomedical applications of the responsive materials are discussed, and the underlying interrelationships are revealed. The molecular structures and design principles are closely related to the sources of stimuli. Finally, the challenging issues of stimuli‐responsive materials are proposed. This review will provide scientific guidance to promote the clinical applications of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials. This review systematically summarizes the advantages, the response mechanisms, and the key design principles of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials. The biomedical applications, the current challenges, and development trends of stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials are also discussed. Stimuli‐responsive antibacterial materials are appealing to achieve intelligent and personalized medicine, that can avoid the formation of biofilm and inhibit the emergence of drug‐resistant bacteria.

The increasing demand for the multidimensional and dynamic control of light has spurred the development of stimuli‐responsive, reconfigurable, and programmable optical systems. Liquid crystals (LCs), which combine liquid‐like stimuli‐responsiveness and crystal‐like orientational ordering, have emerged as highly appealing soft materials. Owing to their exceptional optical performance and programmable functionalities, they are becoming incredibly important materials in active planar optics and photonics. Additionally, silk proteins, luminescent materials, and metasurfaces exhibit dynamic optical properties, enabling remarkable multifunctional applications. This review focuses on the advancements in stimuli‐responsive materials, including LCs, silk proteins, luminescent materials, and active metasurfaces as well as some of these materials paired with LCs. Their attractive tunable applications in optics and photonics, along with the great potential for the future development of active optical systems, are also emphasized. Stimuli‐responsive platforms including liquid crystals, proteins, luminescent materials, and metasurfaces possess considerable allure for the development of active optics and photonics applications owing to their dynamic control of light field. This review presents recent advancements achieved with these platforms, which greatly facilitate the emergence of diverse multifunctional optical technologies including smart displays, advanced imaging, information processing, and intelligent robotics.

Photonic actuators, serving as an emerging kind of intelligent stimuli‐responsive material, can exhibit the abilities to change their structural colors/fluorescence and shapes under specific external stimuli, which have demonstrated essential applications in the fields of intelligent soft robotics, sensors, bionics, information storage, anti‐counterfeiting, and energy harvesting. In this review, we reported the state‐of‐the‐art research progress of stimuli‐responsive photonic actuators classified on the basis of the material type and focusing on the actuation mechanisms, design principles, and processing techniques. We also broadly summarized the relative applications of photonic actuators in bionics, intelligent robots, sensors, and so on. Finally, a vision for the challenges in the area and future promising directions of stimuli‐responsive photonic actuators is presented. In this review, the recent progress of stimuli‐responsive photonic actuators with structural color‐/fluorescence color‐changing and shape‐changing capabilities has been systematically presented.

The remarkable advantages and promising application potentials of aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) materials have seen significant advancements in recent years. Notably, AIE materials incorporating dynamic covalent bonds (DCBs) have garnered escalating attention and demonstrated remarkable progress due to their reversible and self‐adaptive properties, thus exhibiting immense potential across various domains including biomedicine, nanomaterials, sensing, and optical displays. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the recent strides in DCBs‐based AIE materials, organized by the types of dynamic covalent bonds utilized, such as Diels–Alder reaction, imine bond, transesterification, boronic ester bond, disulfide bond, [2+2] Cycloaddition Reaction and X‐yne adducts exchange. Through exemplifying representative cases, we elucidate the design principles of chemical structures and the diverse dynamic behaviors exhibited by DCBs‐based AIE materials. Leveraging the principles of dynamic covalent chemistry, these emissive materials can be facilely prepared, and they possess inherent self‐adaptability and responsiveness to stimuli. Finally, we present succinct conclusions and discuss future trends in this burgeoning field, offering fresh insights into the design of novel luminescent materials based on dynamic covalent bonds for broader applications. This review summarizes the current progress in aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) materials incorporated with dynamic covalent bonds (DCBs), including Diels–Alder, imine, transesterification, boronic ester, and disulfide bonds. DCBs‐based AIE materials are endowed with the characteristics of facile preparation, self‐adaptation, and stimuli‐responsiveness. We hope the review is helpful for the design of the AIE materials for more broad applications.

Stimuli‐responsive materials have raised major attention in digital technology, sensors and biomedical applications owing to quick response towards external stimuli, for example light, voltage, pressure, temperature, mechanical friction and pH. Nevertheless, action of external stimuli on organic materials affects their internal physico‐chemical properties and facilitates improved thermal/photo stability, tuning detection sensitivity, accuracy and biocompatibility. This review article highlights recent progress on stimuli‐responsive materials with mixed valence species, viologens, twisting chirality, crystalline/amorphous, sol‐gel phase transitions and resulting supramolecular nanostructures via non‐covalent interactions. These materials can be applied in flexible electronics, drug delivery, detection of pollutants and bioimaging. Thus, the demand for widespread research on development of stimuli‐responsive materials are requisite to resolve the challenges pertaining to stability and sensitivity of devices for design in comprehensive technology. Smart for the future: Stimuli‐responsive smart/intelligent materials play a remarkable role in electronics, sensors and therapeutic applications owing to changes of physico‐chemical properties and mechanical transformations, isomerizations via mixed valence states, viologens, generation of surface charges under light, voltage, force and pH. Thereby, these responsive materials shown wide range applications from materials to biology leads device applications.

To navigate in complex and unstructured real‐world environments, soft miniature robots need to possess multiple functions, including autonomous environmental sensing, self‐adaptation, and multimodal locomotion. However, to achieve multifunctionality, artificial soft robots should respond to multiple stimuli, which can be achieved by multimaterial integration using facile and flexible fabrication methods. Here, a multimaterial integration strategy for fabricating soft millirobots that uses electrodeposition to integrate two inherently non‐adherable materials, superhydrophilic hydrogels and superhydrophobic elastomers, together via gel roots is proposed. This approach enables the authors to electrodeposit sodium alginate hydrogel onto a laser‐induced graphene‐coated elastomer, which can then be laser cut into various shapes to function as multi‐stimuli‐responsive soft robots (MSRs). Each MSR can respond to six different stimuli to autonomously transform their shapes, and mimic flowers, vines, mimosas, and flytraps. It is demonstrated that MSRs can climb slopes, switch locomotion modes, self‐adapt between air‐liquid environments, and transport cargo between different environments. This multimaterial integration strategy enables creating untethered soft millirobots that have multifunctionality, such as environmental sensing, self‐propulsion, and self‐adaptation, paving the way for their future operation in complex real‐world environments. Soft millirobots with reconfigurable morphology, multimodal locomotion, and multifunctionality are fabricated by electrodeposition. Induced gel roots between the hydrophilic hydrogel and the hydrophobic elastomer enable robust and permanent integration. The fabricated millirobot exhibits shape morphing and locomotion in response to six environmental stimuli, such as humidity, temperature, light, radio frequency heating, magnetic field, and chemical solvent.

Stimuli‐responsive polymers have found applications as shape‐memory materials, optical switches, and sensors, but the installation of these responsive properties in non‐polar and inert polyolefins is challenging. In this contribution, a series of spiropyran (SP)‐based comonomers are synthesized and copolymerized with ethylene or ethylene/cyclic monomers. In addition to great mechanical and surface properties, these functionalized polyolefins responded to light, heat, and force, which induced changes in the polymer structure to transmit color or mechanical signals. These interesting responsive properties are also installed in a series of commercial polyolefin materials through reactive extrusion, making the scalable production of these materials possible. A spiropyran (SP)‐based polyolefin is shown here, which can simultaneously achieve exciting functions such as mechanochromism, photochromism, thermochromism, shape memory, and so on. More importantly, these interesting responsive properties are also installed in a series of commercial polyolefin materials through reactive extrusion, making the scalable production of these materials possible.

Advanced switchable molecules and materials have shown great potential in numerous applications. These novel materials can express different states of physicochemical properties as controlled by a designated stimulus, such that the processing condition can always be maintained in an optimized manner for improved efficiency and sustainability throughout the whole process. Herein, the recent advances in switchable molecules/materials in oil recovery and oily waste cleanup are reviewed. Oil recovery and oily waste cleanup are of critical importance to the industry and environment. Switchable materials can be designed with various types of switchable properties, including i) switchable interfacial activity, ii) switchable viscosity, iii) switchable solvent, and iv) switchable wettability. The materials can then be deployed into the most suitable applications according to the process requirements. An in‐depth discussion about the fundamental basis of the design considerations is provided for each type of switchable material, followed by details about their performances and challenges in the applications. Finally, an outlook for the development of next‐generation switchable molecules/materials is discussed. Switchable molecules and materials have been drawing increasing interests in the oil recovery and oily wastes cleanup to improve chemical/energy efficiency and process sustainability. Herein, a comprehensive review is provided to introduce the fundamental basis for the design and fabrication of advanced switchable materials, to present their recent progress in applications, and to discuss their limitations and future outlooks.

Metal halide perovskites are recognized for their solution processability and high luminescent efficiency. Their broad optoelectronic applications are however challenged by their high sensitivity to the environment, a consequence of their ionic nature and low formation energy. Nevertheless, this sensitivity allows for a range of luminescent responses to different stimuli, positioning them as a novel class of responsive materials. This review aims to elucidate the flexible and diverse luminescence responses in metal halide perovskites while highlighting their significance for future information‐related applications. It begins by introducing the working principles of responsive luminescent metal halide perovskites, followed by discussions on their changes in luminescence color, intensity, and lifetime in response to various stimuli, along with further elaboration on their emerging applications in sensing, anti‐counterfeiting, and information encryption. It concludes by summarizing the challenges and providing perspectives on the future development of this exciting field. The sensitivity of metal halide perovskites to external stimuli categorizes them as emerging responsive materials. This review systematically discusses their stimuli‐responsive luminescent properties, elucidates their diverse applications in information‐related domains, and outlines the current challenges and prospects.

Smart‐responsive aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) materials have emerged as promising bio‐nanomaterials for tumor diagnosis and therapy due to their enhanced fluorescence in aggregated states, overcoming the aggregation‐caused quenching of traditional fluorophores. These materials enable the construction of efficient imaging and therapeutic platforms in complex biological environments. Stimuli‐responsive AIE systems can be categorized into pH‐, redox‐, thermo‐, enzyme‐responsive, and externally triggered types. Despite significant progress in AIE‐based tumor imaging and therapy, critical challenges in their rational design and biomedical application remain insufficiently addressed. This review summarizes recent advances in stimuli‐responsive AIE materials for tumor theranostics, focusing on their design strategies, functional mechanisms, and representative applications. Current limitations and future perspectives are also discussed to guide the development of next‐generation AIE‐based platforms.