Flexible electronics are transforming sensing, actuation, and human–machine interaction from rigid, planar platforms into compliant systems that can conform to skin, soft tissues, and complex curvilinear surfaces. Within this rapidly evolving field, magnetic-material-based flexible devices have attracted increasing attention because they offer several capabilities that are difficult to achieve simultaneously with conventional resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, or optical approaches, including remote readout, tolerance to encapsulation and intervening media, programmable field distributions, and robust operation in sealed, wet, contaminated, or sterile environments. These unique features make magnetic flexible systems particularly attractive for wearable monitoring, electronic skin, tactile interfaces, biomedical devices, and soft robotics. However, their development is fundamentally constrained by the intrinsic tension between magnetic performance and mechanical compliance: materials with strong and stable magnetic responses are often rigid or brittle, whereas highly deformable matrices tend to dilute, destabilize, or complicate magnetic functionality.
This review provides a systematic overview of recent progress in magnetic-material-enabled flexible devices through an integrated framework spanning material systems, manufacturing strategies, and application scenarios. First, we summarize the magnetic material platforms used in flexible systems, including soft magnetic materials for flux guidance, field concentration, and low-coercivity sensing; hard magnetic composites for remanent field generation, information encoding, and magnetic torque output; and superparamagnetic nanoparticles for nanoscale magnetic manipulation, magnetic heating, and biomedical compatibility. Their distinct magnetic response mechanisms are discussed in relation to deformation tolerance, signal stability, and device function. Second, we compare the major manufacturing routes for flexible magnetic devices, including particle mixing and casting for bulk composites, thin-film deposition and transfer integration for high-performance magnetic layers, as well as micro/nanostructuring and additive manufacturing for programmable architectures. Particular attention is paid to critical engineering issues such as particle dispersion, interfacial adhesion, stress transfer, magnetic anisotropy evolution, encapsulation, and the long-term reliability of devices under repeated bending, stretching, and cyclic loading.
We further analyze representative applications in four major categories: magnetic electronic skin for sealed touch and touchless interaction, health monitoring systems for wireless or low-power biomechanical signal acquisition, tactile interfaces capable of multidimensional force reconstruction, and magnetically actuated soft robotic systems for remote and spatially selective control. Beyond these major directions, emerging applications in electromagnetic functional materials, industrial inspection, and biointegrated systems are also highlighted. Across these examples, a common theme emerges: magnetic flexible devices are most powerful when their material response, structural design, and readout strategy are co-optimized rather than developed independently. In particular, programmable magnetization, distributed magnetic architectures, and data-assisted signal decoding are becoming increasingly important for improving sensitivity, decoupling capability, environmental robustness, and scalability.
Overall, this review shows that magnetic flexible devices represent not merely a magnetic extension of conventional flexible electronics, but a distinct technological route with unique physical advantages and system-level possibilities. At the same time, several bottlenecks remain before broad practical deployment can be achieved, including the difficulty of simultaneously maximizing magnetic functionality and softness, drift caused by stress-induced anisotropy changes and interfacial degradation, insufficient understanding of deformation-dependent magnetic behavior, and challenges in scalable manufacturing and low-power integrated readout. Future progress will require coordinated advances in material design, multiscale structural engineering, stable magnetization strategies, compensation and inversion models, and standardized reliability evaluation. Addressing these issues will be essential for translating magnetic flexible devices from proof-of-concept demonstrations to deployable platforms in healthcare, human–machine interaction, and intelligent soft systems.