Self-Powered Smart Textiles for Accelerated Wound Healing through Band Alignment in Piezoelectric Heterojunctions

Infected foot wounds often exhibit markedly prolonged healing due to local ischemia, multidrug-resistant pathogens, and chronic inflammation, representing a major clinical challenge. This work reports a piezoelectric heterojunction-based smart textile dressing, in which the heterostructure was constructed via atomic layer deposition (ALD) to achieve precise band-structure engineering. By tailoring the number of ZnO deposition cycles on BaTiO₃, the optimized BaTiO₃-10ZnO heterojunction (10 ALD cycles) exhibits the most favorable band alignment and a 2.95-fold boost in ROS generation efficiency compared with pristine BaTiO₃. The composite is covalently immobilized onto textile fibers via amine-aldehyde condensation, yielding an intelligent textile platform. In a rat plantar infection model, the dressing, activated by walking-triggered mechanical pressure, achieves the most prominent therapeutic outcome, outperforming other ALD-cycle variants and commercial Ag⁺ dressings. Systematic histological and transcriptomic analyses further unveil its multipronged antibacterial mechanisms, including bacterial membrane disruption, metabolic interference, and oxidative-stress induction. This work offers an innovative strategy for self-powered antimicrobial systems and demonstrates great potential for chronic wound management.