Low-Cost And High-Performance Flexible And Stretchable Strain Sensor For Human Movement Monitoring

In recent years,flexible wearable electronic technology has become an important field of electronic device research.Among them,the flexible and stretchable sensor with high performance,is one of the basic core components,which can realize the accurate perception of external signals.Due to the good conformal characteristics of curved surface and the characteristics of light,flexibility and toughness,flexible and stretchable sensors have broad application prospects in the strategic emerging fields such as human-computer interaction,intelligent robot,artificial intelligence,wearable equipment,medical monitoring and sports health.Flexible and stretchable strain sensors are vital for emerging fields of wearable and personal electronics,but it is a huge challenge for them to possess both wide-range measurement capability and good sensitivity.In this work,we successfully prepared two kinds of strain sensors by using cost effective simple fabrication process.Here,we try the simple fabrication strategy of a piezo-resistive strain sensor utilizing different materials,and compare the capacity of the sensors to measure the human movements and track a wide range of human finger motion is illustrated.The first sensor is fabricated by infusing graphene flakes into a rubber-like adhesive pad and the second one is made by absorbing carbon black onto the surface of an Ecoflex substrate.The fabricated graphene flakes/ rubber-like adhesive pad sensors can withstand strain up to 150%,with the gauge factor of the sensors ranges from 8 to 115.While,the CB-Ecoflex based strain sensor exhibits a large stretchability with a maximum recoverable strain up to 500% and a high gauge factor of 18.7.It also shows a low hysteresis,a fast signal response and a high reproducibility.Consequently,we choose the CB-Ecoflex strain sensor as it has comparatively good sensing ability,high stretchability and great linearity to apply for further applications.Therefore,wearable gadgets are created utilizing the fabricated Carbon Black-based strain sensor to measure finger movement and throat swallowing movement.The sensor is additionally utilized in a robotics finger application to check if it is good for rehabilitation training.These experiments illustrate the applicability of the sensor for real-time checking,particularly in wearable human interactive devices.