Full 3D Printing of Stretchable Piezoresistive Sensor with Hierarchical Porosity and Multimodulus Architecture

A soft piezoresistive sensor with its unique characteristics, such as human skin, light weight, and multiple functions, yields a variety of possible practical applications to skin‐attachable electronics, human–machine interfaces, and electronic skins. However, conventional filler‐matrix piezoresistive sensors often suffer from unsatisfactory sensitivity or insufficient measurement range, as well as significant cross‐correlation between out‐of‐plane pressure and in‐plane extension. Here, a stretchable piezoresistive sensor (SPS) is realized by combining a hierarchically porous sensing element with a multimodulus device architecture via a full 3D printing process. As a result, the sensor exhibits high sensitivity (5.54 kPa^?1), large measurement range (from 10 Pa to 800 kPa), limited cross‐correlation, and excellent durability. Meanwhile, benefiting from the porous structure and mechanical mismatch design, which efficiently distributes the stress away from the sensing element, the device experiences only 7% resistance change at 50% stretching. This approach is employed to rapidly program and readily manufacture stylish, all‐in‐one, functional devices for various applications, demonstrating that the technique is promising for customized stretchable electronics.     

Skin-like Omnidirectional Stretchable Platform with Negative Poisson's Ratio for Wearable Strain–Pressure Simultaneous Sensor

Conventional elastomeric polymers used as substrates for wearable platforms have large positive Poisson's ratios (≈0.5) that cause a deformation mismatch with human skin that is multidirectionally elongated under bending of joints. This causes practical problems in elastomer-based wearable devices, such as delamination and detachment, leading to poorly reliable functionality. To overcome this issue, auxetic-structured mechanical reinforcement with glass fibers is applied to the elastomeric film, resulting in a negative Poisson's ratio (NPR), which is a skin-like stretchable substrate (SLSS). Several parameters for determining the materials and geometrical dimensions of the auxetic-structured reinforcing fillers are considered to maximize the NPR. Based on numerical simulation and digital image correlation analysis, the deformation tendencies and strain distribution of the SLSS are investigated and compared with those of the pristine elastomeric substrate. Owing to the strain-localization characteristics, an independent strain-pressure sensing system is fabricated using SLSS with a Ag-based elastomeric ink and a carbon nanotube-based force-sensitive resistor. Finally, it is demonstrated that the SLSS-based sensor platform can be applied as a wearable device to monitor the physical burden on the wrist in real time.     

Stretchable,Skin‐Mountable,and Wearable Strain Sensors and Their Potential Applications: A Review

There is a growing demand for flexible and soft electronic devices. In particular, stretchable, skin‐mountable, and wearable strain sensors are needed for several potential applications including personalized health‐monitoring, human motion detection, human‐machine interfaces, soft robotics, and so forth. This Feature Article presents recent advancements in the development of flexible and stretchable strain sensors. The article shows that highly stretchable strain sensors are successfully being developed by new mechanisms such as disconnection between overlapped nanomaterials, crack propagation in thin films, and tunneling effect, different from traditional strain sensing mechanisms. Strain sensing performances of recently reported strain sensors are comprehensively studied and discussed, showing that appropriate choice of composite structures as well as suitable interaction between functional nanomaterials and polymers are essential for the high performance strain sensing. Next, simulation results of piezoresistivity of stretchable strain sensors by computational models are reported. Finally, potential applications of flexible strain sensors are described. This survey reveals that flexible, skin‐mountable, and wearable strain sensors have potential in diverse applications while several grand challenges have to be still overcome.     

Flexible and Stretchable Fiber-Shaped Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Biomechanical Monitoring and Human-Interactive Sensing

Wearable, flexible, and even stretchable tactile sensors, such as various types of electronic skin, have attracted extensive attention, which can adapt to complex and irregular surfaces, maximize the matching of wearable devices, and conformally apply onto human organs. However, it is a great challenge to simultaneously achieve breathability, permeability, and comfortability for their development. Herein, mitigating the problem by miniaturizing and integrating the sensors is tried. Highly flexible and stretchable coaxial structure fiber-shaped triboelectric nanogenerators (F-TENGs) with a diameter of 0.63 mm are created by orderly depositing conductive material of silver nanowires/carbon nanotubes and encapsulated polydimethylsiloxane onto the stretchable spandex fiber. As a self-powered multifunctional sensor, the resulting composite fiber can convert mechanical stimuli into electrical signals without affecting the normal human body. Moreover, the F-TENGs can be easily integrated into traditional textiles to form tactile sensor arrays. Through the tactile sensor arrays, the real-time tactile trajectory and pressure distribution can be precisely mapped. This work may provide a new method to fabricate fiber-based pressure sensors with high sensitivity and stretchability, which have great application prospects in personal healthcare monitoring and human–machine interactions.     

Wearable Stretchable Dry and Self-Adhesive Strain Sensors with Conformal Contact to Skin for High-Quality Motion Monitoring

Wearable stretchable strain sensors can have important applications in many areas. However, the high noise is a big hurdle for their application to monitor body movement. The noise is mainly due to the motion artifacts related to the poor contact between the sensors and skin. Here, wearable stretchable dry and self-adhesive strain sensors that can always form conformal contact to skin even during body movement are demonstrated. They are prepared via solution coating and consist of two layers, a dry adhesive layer made of biocompatible elastomeric waterborne polyurethane and a sensing layer made of a non-adhesive composite of reduced graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes. The adhesive layer makes the sensors conformal to skin, while the sensing layer exhibits a resistance sensitive to strain. The sensors are used to accurately monitor both small- and large-scale body movements, including various joint movements and muscle movements. They can always generate high-quality signals even on curvilinear skin surface and during irregular skin deformation. The sensitivity is remarkably higher while the noise is saliently lower than the non-adhesive strain sensors. They can also be used to monitor the movements along two perpendicular directions, which cannot be achieved by the non-adhesive strain sensors.     

Stress Controllability in Thermal and Electrical Conductivity of 3D Elastic Graphene‐Crosslinked Carbon Nanotube Sponge/Polyimide Nanocomposite

Stress controllability in thermal and electrical conductivity is important for flexible piezoresistive devices. Due to the strength‐elasticity trade‐off, comprehensive investigation of stress‐controllable conduction in elastic high‐modulus polymers is challenging. Here presented is a 3D elastic graphene‐crosslinked carbon nanotube sponge/polyimide (G_w‐CNT/PI) nanocomposite. Graphene welding at the junction enables both phonon and electron transfer as well as avoids interfacial slippage during cyclic compression. The uniform G_w‐CNT/PI comprising a high‐modulus PI deposited on a porous templated network combines stress‐controllable thermal/electrical conductivity and cyclic elastic deformation. The uniform composites show different variation trends controlled by the porosity due to different phonon and electron conduction mechanisms. A relatively high k (3.24 W m^?1 K^?1, 1620% higher than PI) and suitable compressibility (16.5% under 1 MPa compression) enables the application of the composite in flexible elastic thermal interface conductors, which is further analyzed by finite element simulations. The interconnected network favors a high stress‐sensitive electrical conductivity (sensitivity, 973% at 9.6% strain). Thus, the G_w‐CNT/PI composite can be an important candidate material for piezoresistive sensors upon porosity optimization based on stress‐controllable thermal or electrical conductivity. The results provide insights toward controlling the stress‐induced thermal/electrical conductivities of 3D interconnected templated composite networks for piezoresistive conductors or sensors.     

A Robust Wearable Point-of-Care CNT-Based Strain Sensor for Wirelessly Monitoring Throat-Related Illnesses

Point-of-care testing (POC) has the ability to detect chronic and infectious diseases early or at the time of occurrence and provide a state-of-the-art personalized healthcare system. Recently, wearable and flexible sensors have been employed to analyze sweat, glucose, blood, and human skin conditions. However, a flexible sensing system that allows for the real-time monitoring of throat-related illnesses, such as salivary parotid gland swelling caused by flu and mumps, is necessary. Here, for the first time, a wearable, highly flexible, and stretchable piezoresistive sensing patch based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is reported, which can record muscle expansion or relaxation in real-time, and thus act as a next-generation POC sensor. The patch offers an excellent gauge factor for in-plane stretching and spatial expansion with low hysteresis. The actual extent of muscle expansion is calculated and the gauge factor for applications entailing volumetric deformations is redefined. Additionally, a bluetooth-low-energy system that tracks muscle activity in real-time and transmits the output signals wirelessly to a smartphone app is utilized. Numerical calculations verify that the low stress and strain lead to excellent mechanical reliability and repeatability. Finally, a dummy muscle is inflated using a pneumatic-based actuator to demonstrate the application of the affixed wearable next-generation POC sensor.     

A Self‐Healable,Highly Stretchable,and Solution Processable Conductive Polymer Composite for Ultrasensitive Strain and Pressure Sensing

Mimicking human skin's functions to develop electronic skins has inspired tremendous efforts in design and synthesis of novel soft materials with simplified fabrication methods. However, it still remains a great challenge to develop electronically conductive materials that are both stretchable and self‐healable. Here it is demonstrated that a ternary polymer composite comprised of polyaniline, polyacrylic acid, and phytic acid can exhibit high stretchability ( ≈ 500%) and excellent self‐healing properties. The polymer composite with optimized composition shows an electrical conductivity of 0.12 S cm^?1. On rupture, both electrical and mechanical properties can be restored with ≈ 99% efficiency in a 24 h period, which is enabled by the dynamic hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions. It is further shown that this composite is both strain and pressure sensitive, and therefore can be used for fabricating strain and pressure sensors to detect a variety of mechanical deformations with ultrahigh sensitivity. The sensitivity and sensing range are the highest among all of the reported self‐healable piezoresistive pressure sensors and even surpass most flexible mechanical sensors. Notably, this composite is prepared via a solution casting process, which potentially allows for large‐area, low‐cost fabrication electronic skins.     

Auxetic Foam‐Based Contact‐Mode Triboelectric Nanogenerator with Highly Sensitive Self‐Powered Strain Sensing Capabilities to Monitor Human Body Movement

The first contact‐mode triboelectric self‐powered strain sensor using an auxetic polyurethane foam, conductive fabric, and polytetrafluroethylene (PTFE) is fabricated. Utilizing the auxetic properties of the polyurethane foam, the auxetic polyurethane foam would expand into the PTFE when the foam is stretched, causing contact electrification. Due to a larger contact area between the PTFE and the foam as the foam is stretched, this device can serve effectively as a strain sensor. The sensitivity of this method is explored, and this sensor has the highest sensitivity in all triboelectric nanogenerator devices that are used previously as a strain sensor. Different applications of this strain sensor are shown, and this sensor can be used as a human body monitoring system, self‐powered scale to measure weight, and a seat belt to measure body movements inside a car seat.     

Elastomeric Electronic Skin for Prosthetic Tactile Sensation

This report demonstrates a wearable elastomer‐based electronic skin including resistive sensors for monitoring finger articulation and capacitive tactile pressure sensors that register distributed pressure along the entire length of the finger. Pressure sensitivity in the order of 0.001 to 0.01 kPa^?1 for pressures from 5 to 405 kPa, which includes much of the range of human physiological sensing, is achieved by implementing soft, compressible silicone foam as the dielectric and stretchable thin‐metal films. Integrating these sensors in a textile glove allows the decoupling of the strain and pressure cross‐sensitivity of the tactile sensors, enabling precise grasp analysis. The sensorized glove is implemented in a human‐in‐the‐loop system for controlling the grasp of objects, a critical step toward hand prosthesis with integrated sensing capabilities.     

Porous Conductive Hybrid Composite with Superior Pressure Sensitivity and Dynamic Range

Porous conductive composites hold immense promise in flexible sensors and soft robotics due to their pressure-responsive electrical conductivity. Unlike non-porous composites whose pressure sensitivity is limited by relatively high elastic modulus, porous materials show improved pressure sensitivity owing to their lower stiffness. Despite this, existing porous composites still suffer from insufficient pressure sensitivity or narrow detection ranges, severely restricting their applications. This work presents a liquid metal hybrid filler porous composite to address these issues. Through experiment and simulation optimization, the composite exhibits a conductivity increase of five order-of-magnitude over 0–250 kPa, demonstrating a 900% higher pressure sensitivity than the best non-porous counterpart in this work. The composite maintains a highly linear response (R² of 0.999) over an exceptionally wide dynamic range up to 8.9 MPa, with a pressure sensitivity of 8.1 MPa^–1, surpassing the state-of-the-art in both pressure range and sensitivity. A proof-of-concept pressure sensor array further demonstrates the composite's excellent sensing performance, showing stable response under 100-cycle loading with a measured pressure deviation of only 1.4%, outperforming existing commercial pressure sensors in terms of sensitivity, detection range and cyclic stability. The porous material design strategy opens doors for high sensitivity pressure sensors in wearable devices, flexible electronics, and soft robotics.     

Colloidal Photonic Crystal Strain Sensor Integrated with Deformable Graphene Phototransducer

Flexible, architectured, photonic nanostructures such as colloidal photonic crystals (CPCs) can serve as colorimetric strain sensors, where external applied strain leads to a noticeable color change. However, CPCs' response to strain is difficult to quantify without the use of optical spectroscopy. Integration of flexible electrical readout of CPCs' color change is a challenge due to a lack of flexible/stretchable electrical transducers. This work details a colorimetric strain sensor with optoelectrical quantification based on an integrated system of CPCs over a crumpled graphene phototransducer, which optoelectrically quantifies CPCs, response to strain. The hybrid system enables direct visual perception of strain, while strain quantification via electrical measurement of the hybrid system outperforms that of crumpled graphene strain sensors by more than 100 times. The unique combination of a photonic sensing element with a deformable transducer will allow for the development of novel, electrically quantifiable colorimetric sensors with high sensitivity.     

MWCNTs based flexible and stretchable strain sensors

Carbon nanotubes have potential applications in flexible and stretchable devices due to their remarkable electromechanical properties. Flexible and stretchable strain sensors of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) with aligned or random structures were fabricated on poly-dimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate with different techniques. It was observed that the spraycoatedtechniquebased strain sensor fabricated on PDMS substrate showed higher sensitivity higher stretchability, better linearity and excellent longer time stability than the sensor fabricated with other methods presented in this work. The scanning electron microscopy images indicated the spray coating technique can produce a better uniform and compact CNT network, which is the important role affecting the performance of CNT-based flexible strain sensors.     

Ultra-Sensitive and Stretchable Ionic Skins for High-Precision Motion Monitoring

Stretchability and sensitivity are essential properties of wearable electronics for effective motion monitoring. In general, increasing the sensitivity of strain sensors based on ionic conductors trades off elasticity, which results in low sensitivity of the strain sensors at large mechanical deformations. To address this, ion-permeable conducting polymer electrodes with low contact resistance are utilized in ionic gel-based strain sensors. Using a rectangular-shaped ionic gel and ion-permeable electrodes significantly increase the gauge factor of the strain sensor, similar to the theoretical value at a given strain. To further increase the sensitivity of the strain sensor, the ionic gel is patterned with zigzagged tracks that gap apart as the gel stretches, and the gaps close as the gel contracts, leading to a large variation in the relative resistance upon stretching. By combining the zigzagged ionic gel and the ion-permeable electrodes, highly sensitive stretchable sensors are realized with a record-high gauge factor of 173, compared to existing ionic conductor-based stretchable strain sensors. The zigzag-patterned ionic sensor can successfully monitor various motions when attached to the human body. These results are expected to afford promising strategies for developing highly sensitive, stretchable sensing systems for E-skin sensors and soft robotics.     

Nanoparticle-Based Strain Gauges: Anisotropic Response Characteristics,Multidirectional Strain Sensing,and Novel Approaches to Healthcare Applications

Directional strain sensing is essential for advanced sensor applications in the field of human-machine interfaces and healthcare. Here, the angle dependent anisotropic strain sensitivity caused by charge carriers percolating through cross-linked gold nanoparticle (GNP) networks is studied and these versatile materials are used for the fabrication of wearable triaxial pulse and gesture sensors. More specifically, the anisotropic response of 1,9-nonanedithiol cross-linked GNP films is separated into geometric and piezoresistive contributions by fitting the measured data with an analytic model. Hereby, piezoresistive coefficients of g₁₁ ∼ 32 and g₁₂ ∼ 21 are extracted, indicating a slightly anisotropic response behavior of the GNP-based material. To use the material for healthcare applications, arrangements of three GNP transducers are patterned lithographically and fully embedded into a highly flexible silicone polymer (Dragon Skin 30). The new encapsulation method ensures good and robust electrical contacts and enables facile handling and protection from external influences. A facile read-out with wireless data transmission using off-the-shelf electrical components underlines the great potential of these devices for applications as skin-wearable healthcare sensors.     

Recent Progress in Advanced Tactile Sensing Technologies for Soft Grippers

Tactile sensing technology is crucial for soft grippers. Soft grippers equipped with intelligent tactile sensing systems based on various sensors can interact safely with the unstructured environments and obtain precise properties of objects (e.g., size and shape). It is essential to develop state-of-the-art sensing technologies for soft grippers to handle different grasping tasks. In this review, the development of tactile sensing techniques for robotic hands is first introduced. Then, the principles and structures of different types of sensors normally adopted in soft grippers, including capacitive tactile sensors, piezoresistive tactile sensors, piezoelectric tactile sensors, fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, vision-based tactile sensors, triboelectric tactile sensors, and other advanced sensors developed recently are briefly presented. Furthermore, sensing modalities and methodologies for soft grippers are also described in aspects of force measurement, perception of object properties, slip detection, and fusion of perception. The application scenarios of soft grippers are also summarized based on these advanced sensing technologies. Finally, the challenges of tactile sensing technologies for soft grippers that need to be tackled are discussed and perspectives in addressing these challenges are pointed out.     

Chemical Sensing Systems that Utilize Soft Electronics on Thin Elastomeric Substrates with Open Cellular Designs

A collection of materials and device architectures are introduced for thin, stretchable arrays of ion sensors that mount on open cellular substrates to facilitate solution exchange for use in biointegrated electronics. The results include integration strategies and studies of fundamental characteristics in chemical sensing and mechanical response. The latter involves experimental measurements and theoretical simulations that establish important considerations in the design of low modulus, stretchable properties in cellular substrates, and in the realization of advanced capabilities in spatiotemporal mapping of chemicals' gradients. As the chemical composition of extracellular fluids contains valuable information related to biological function, the concepts introduced here have potential utility across a range of skin‐ and internal‐organ‐integrated electronics where soft mechanics, fluidic permeability, and advanced chemical sensing capabilities are key requirements.     

Wearable and Highly Sensitive Graphene Strain Sensors for Human Motion Monitoring

Sensing strain of soft materials in small scale has attracted increasing attention. In this work, graphene woven fabrics (GWFs) are explored for highly sensitive sensing. A flexible and wearable strain sensor is assembled by adhering the GWFs on polymer and medical tape composite film. The sensor exhibits the following features: ultra‐light, relatively good sensitivity, high reversibility, superior physical robustness, easy fabrication, ease to follow human skin deformation, and so on. Some weak human motions are chosen to test the notable resistance change, including hand clenching, phonation, expression change, blink, breath, and pulse. Because of the distinctive features of high sensitivity and reversible extensibility, the GWFs based piezoresistive sensors have wide potential applications in fields of the displays, robotics, fatigue detection, body monitoring, and so forth.     

Graphene and Carbon Nanotube Auxetic Rubber Bionic Composites with Negative Variation of the Electrical Resistance and Comparison with Their Nonbionic Counterparts

Microorganism metabolic activity can facilitate the formation of cellular material systems that have unusual mechanical and physical properties. In the living world microorganisms are commonly used for preparing porous food by fermentation; here carbon nanotubes, graphene nanoplatelets, and a mix of them are dispersed in liquid silicone rubber with single‐cell fungi of commercial beer yeast. The fermentation of such microorganisms during the gelling of the silicone matrix results in bionic composites with buckled/collapsed cells that infer, as rationalized with an analytical model and excluded in a abiotic experimental comparison, auxetic properties. During stretching it is found that the Poisson's ratio of such composites changes sign, from negative to positive, and the variation of the electrical resistance is negative. In addition to the conductivity increment, a general increment of the stretchability and damage resistance with respect to the composites prepared by abiotic process is observed. Bionic composites, even if in their infancy, can thus be multifunctional and superior to their traditional/abiotic counterparts.     

Highly Aligned,Anisotropic Carbon Nanofiber Films for Multidirectional Strain Sensors with Exceptional Selectivity

Realization of sensing multidirectional strains is essential to understanding the nature of complex motions. Traditional uniaxial strain sensors lack the capability to detect motions working in different directions, limiting their applications in unconventional sensing technology areas, like sophisticated human–machine interface and real‐time monitoring of dynamic body movements. Herein, a stretchable multidirectional strain sensor is developed using highly aligned, anisotropic carbon nanofiber (ACNF) films via a facile, low‐cost, and scalable electrospinning approach. The fabricated strain sensor exhibits semitransparency, good stretchability of over 30%, outstanding durability for over 2500 cycles, and remarkable anisotropic strain sensing performance with maximum gauge factors of 180 and 0.3 for loads applied parallel and perpendicular to fiber alignment, respectively. Cross‐plied ACNF strain sensors are fabricated by orthogonally stacking two single‐layer ACNFs, which present a unique capability to distinguish the directions and magnitudes of strains with a remarkable selectivity of 3.84, highest among all stretchable multidirectional strain sensors reported so far. Their unconventional applications are demonstrated by detecting multi‐degrees‐of‐freedom synovial joint movements of the human body and monitoring wrist movements for systematic improvement of golf performance. The potential applications of novel multidirectional sensors reported here may shed new light into future development of next‐generation soft, flexible electronics.