Skin-like strain sensors enabled by elastomer composites for human-machine interfaces

Abstract

Flexible electronics exhibit tremendous potential applications in biosensing and human-machine interfaces for their outstandingmechanical performance and excellent electrical characteristics. In thiswork, we introduce a soft, skin-integrated strain sensor enabled by a ternary elastomer composite of graphene/carbon nanotube (CNT)/Ecoflex, providing a low-cost skin-like platform for conversion of mechanical motion to electricity and sensing of human activities. The device exhibits high sensitivity (the absolute value of the resistance change rate under a testing strain level, 26) and good mechanical stability (surviving ~hundreds of cycles of repeated stretching). Due to the advancedmechanical design of themetallic electrode, the strain sensor shows excellentmechanical tolerance to pressing, bending, twisting, and stretching. The flexible sensor can be directly mounted onto human skin for detecting mechanical motion, exhibiting its great potential in wearable electronics and human-machine interfaces.