Smart Polymeric Wound Dressings for Wound Treatment: Contributions and Applications

Wound management continues to represent a major global healthcare challenge, with the wound care market growing each year and a rising incidence of chronic wounds worldwide. Effective wound healing requires dressings that protect injured tissue, prevent infection, and actively modulate the wound microenvironment to promote tissue regeneration. In recent years, smart polymeric wound dressings have emerged as a functional, more advanced class of wound dressings, engineered from materials capable of responding to stimuli. Physically responsive systems include moisture-adaptive dressings that prevent wound dryness or maceration, pressure-sensitive dressings incorporating flexible capacitive sensors for high mechanical stress mapping, thermoresponsive dressings exploiting sol-gel transitions for temperature-controlled drug release, light-responsive dressings enabling photothermal and photodynamic therapy, and electro-responsive dressings integrating conductive polymers for self-powered electrical stimulation or closed-loop wound monitoring. Chemically responsive systems exploit endogenous biochemical signals, including pH shifts for wound monitoring, reactive oxygen species-cleavable bonds for on-demand drug release, and glucose-responsive platforms for autonomous glycemic regulation in diabetic wounds. Biologically responsive dressings use enzymatic triggers, such as matrix metalloproteinases, hyaluronidase, and bacterial proteases, to achieve autonomous drug delivery. Film-forming sprays further expand the versatility of smart polymeric dressings by enabling contactless application adaptable to irregular wound shapes. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the design, stimuli-responsive mechanisms, characterization methods, and therapeutic outcomes of smart polymeric dressings for wound treatment. Despite promising preclinical results, challenges related to clinical translation, regulatory standardization, and scalable production remain and must be addressed to facilitate widespread clinical adoption. Future directions include multi-stimuli responsive platforms, artificial intelligence-guided wound monitoring, bioprinting of specific dressings, and environmentally sustainable biomaterial design.