Most mute people
cannot speak due to their vocal cord lesion. Herein,
to assist mute people to “speak”, we proposed a wearable
skinlike ultrasensitive artificial graphene throat (WAGT) that integrated
both sound/motion detection and sound emission in single device. In
this work, the growth and patterning of graphene can be realized at
the same time, and a thin poly(vinyl alcohol) film with laser-scribed
graphene was obtained by a water-assisted transferring process. In
virtue of the skinlike and low-resistant substrate, the WAGT has a
high detection sensitivity (relative resistance changes up to 150%
at 133 Ω) and an excellent sound-emitting ability (up to 75
dB at 0.38 W power and 2 mm distance). On the basis of the excellent
mechanical-electrical performance of graphene structure, the sound
detecting and emitting mechanisms of WAGT are realized and discussed.
For sound detection, both the motion of larynx and vibration of vocal
cord contribute to throat movements. For sound emission, a thermal
acoustic model for WAGT was established to reveal the principle of
sound emitting. More importantly, a homemade circuit board was fabricated
to build a dual-mode system, combining the detection and emitting
systems. Meanwhile, different human motions, such as strong and small
throat movements, were also detected and transformed into different
sounds like “OK” and “NO”. Therefore,
the implementation of these sound/motion detection acoustic systems
enable graphene to achieve device-level applications to system-level
applications, and those graphene acoustic systems are wearable for
its miniaturization and light weight.
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