When the word comes to mind, people are more likely to conjure images of Terminator's steel endoskeleton than think of silk and ribbons. But the future is looking something like this: Stamp-on heart monitors, pathogen-sensing micro-antennas, "saran-wrap" defibrillators and silk microchips. Society has had a long-standing historical preoccupation with forcing results out of uncooperative materials (for anyone who has ever spent hours raking leaves or weeding a garden) but new technology deviates surprisingly from this approach, and this may be what transcends bionic technology from the stuff of science fiction into practical application.
Rather than forcing electronic materials to become flexible, researchers are instead making flexible materials electronic, and as close to human tissue as possible. The article below contains an exciting preview of developing bionic technology that may very well become commonplace in the next ten to fifteen years. Some of the ideas have been touched on previously in this blog (see "Computerized Surgical Gloves") but for people who are pressed for time (eg. all of us) this is an excellent grab-bag summary of breaking developments.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346135/title/Beginnings_of_Bionic
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