Wood-based products with high performance have a huge potential due to their naturally occurring origin, renewability, and sustainability. Wood and wood polymers have unique properties, and when combined with synthetic or wood-modified polymers, the resulting materials can compete with fully synthetic oil-based products. In principle, these materials can be integrated into microdevices for technological and biotechnological applications, e.g., tissue culture, microfluidics, micromechanics, microrobotics and artificial muscles, or implemented in civil engineering infrastructures as smart components active to environmental variations, e.g., smart façades for ventilation, due to their compatibility, easy production and low cost. For further implementation, computational, chemical, and engineering fields joined together to produce optimized smart material systems on demand. Moreover, we are exploring the possibility of using other external stimuli besides water activity gradients, e.g., electricity or light, in order to enhance both the actuation and sensing properties of such wood-based products.