Zehao Lan, Shengjie Xue, Junyi Yin, Shaolei Wang, Yunlei Zhou, Jieyue Liao
ABSTRACT Chronic inflammatory skin diseases, encompassing immune‐inflammatory conditions and infection‐associated dermatoses, pose significant clinical challenges due to high prevalence, recurrence, and therapeutic resistance, affect over 30% of the global population. While topical medications are fundamental, their efficacy is often limited by variable drug absorption, patient‐specific dosing needs, and the dynamic complexity of inflammatory microenvironments. This underscores the urgent need for advanced localized treatments that adapt to disease fluctuations while minimizing adverse effects. Smart dressings, engineered using stimuli‐responsive materials and microdevice integration, offer a transformative solution. Evolving beyond single‐stimulus responsiveness, modern smart dressings can simultaneously respond to diverse stimuli with prolonged effectiveness, enhancing compatibility with chronic disease management. This review systematically categorizes and evaluates smart dressing technologies based on their activation mechanisms: exogenous stimuli‐activated (electric/magnetic fields, light, ultrasound, and water), endogenous biochemical signals‐responsive, and pathogen‐specific targeted. Cutting‐edge developments in multimodal responsive interfaces and self‐powered devices are critically examined for their potential to synchronize therapy with evolving pathology. The review analyzes the strengths and limitations of current technologies and proposes future directions, including single materials with multi‐stimuli responsiveness and therapeutic dressings integrated with closed‐loop biomarker monitoring and AI‐driven drug adjustment algorithms.