Recent progress in flexible magnetoelectric composites and devices for next generation wearable electronics

In the modern era of science and technology, the development of flexible electronic devices is one of the key attractions to the widespread research community all over the world due to their potential and advantageous applications in various fields including wearable sensors, flexible and rollable displays, energy conversion, healthcare monitoring, and many others. In a similar fashion, flexible Magnetoelectric (ME) devices also find potential attraction in various real-life applications. Though ME devices have been discovered many decades back and are under tremendous research till date for further performance enhancement, considering the advantages of flexible electronics, the development of flexible ME devices has gained momentous attraction to the research community in the present days. Though there are many review articles where ME devices have been discussed in terms of development, mechanism, and applicability, review articles where the techniques to develop flexible ME devices along with the progress of research in this field have been discussed are very limited in numbers. Therefore, here in the present article, we review the progress and the state-of-the-art development of flexible ME devices and their possible applications in next-generation flexible and wearable electronics. The techniques to develop flexible ME devices and the strategies to improve their output performance have been elaborately explored here. Considering the potential attraction of research in this field in recent times, the challenges and huge future scopes of research have also been discussed explicitly.