Once the requirement of sensitivity has been met, to enable a flexible pressure sensor technology to be widely adopted as an economic and convenient way for sensing diverse human body motions, critical factors need to be considered including low manufacturing cost, a large pressure detection range, and low power consumption. In this work, a facile approach is developed for one-step processing of a large area microstructured elastomer film with high density microfeatures of air voids, which can be seamlessly integrated into the process flow for fabricating flexible capacitive sensors. The fabricated sensors exhibit fast response and high sensitivity in the low pressure range to be able to detect very weak pressure down to 1 Pa and perform reliable wrist pulse monitoring. Compared to previous work, more advantageous features of this sensor are relatively high sensitivity being maintained in a wide pressure range up to 250 kPa and excellent durability under heavy load larger than 1 MPa, attributed to the formed dense air voids inside the film. A smart insole made with the sensor can accurately monitor the real-time walking or running behaviors and even a small weight change less than 1 kg under a heavy load of a 70 kg adult. For both application examples of wrist pulse monitoring and smart insole, the sensors are operated in a 3.3 V electronic system powered by a Li-ion battery, showing the potential for power-constrained wearable applications.
All-inorganic halide perovskites without volatile components have great potential for long term thermal stability. However, the phase stability of all-inorganic perovskites is sensitive to moisture and has been seldom studied. In this work, the phase stability of α-CsPbI2Br was studied in different relative humidity conditions. The moisture resistance of α-CsPbI2Br can be significantly enhanced by using a polymer or organic molecule capping layer including Spiro-MeOTAD. Although an all-inorganic CsPbI2Br perovskite based device using the typical Li salt doped Spiro-MeOTAD layer could offer an efficiency up to 12.6%, it exhibited even worse moisture resistance than a bare perovskite film under the same ambient conditions. This unusual phenomenon is ascribed to the hygroscopic properties of Li-TFSI inducing moisture sensitive phase degradation. Therefore, it is desirable to decrease the amount of, or avoid the Li salt, as a dopant for stable all-inorganic perovskite solar cells with balanced stability and high performance.
Skin-like stretchable sensors with the flexible and soft inorganic/organic electronics have many promising potentials in wearable devices, soft robotics, prosthetics, and health monitoring equipment. Hydrogels with ionic conduction, akin to the biological skin, provide an alternative for soft and stretchable sensor design. However, fully integrated and wearable sensing skin with ionically conductive hydrogel for hand-motion monitoring has not been achieved. In this article, we report a wearable soft ionotronic skin (iSkin) system integrating multichannel stretchable and transparent hydrogel-elastomer hybrid ionic sensors and a wireless electronic control module. The ionic sensor is of resistive type and fabricated by curing ionic hydrogel precursor on a benzophenone-treated preshaped elastomer to form a hydrogel-elastomer hybrid structure. The hydrogelelastomer hybrid iSkin is highly stretchable (*300% strain), transparent (*95% transmittance in the visible light range), and lightweight (<22 g). Experiments demonstrate that the fully integrated iSkin system can conformably attach onto the dexterous hands for recognizing the joint proprioception and hand gesture, and understanding the sign language. Our iSkin system would also provide a test bed for customized material selection and construction in a variety of applications.
An interactive surface using bending gestures as the input is proposed by integrating a flexible strain sensor array and a flexible display screen. To create such a flexible strain sensor array, formation of a reliable interconnection between the elastic sensitive regions and the rigid contact regions is vital to achieve required sensitivity and durability. In this work, a new design with an added interconnect layer on top of the interface regions is used to reduce the bending induced local stress. A stretchable conductive composite by blending carbon black (CB) with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and Ecoflex (CB-PDMS/Ecoflex) is developed for the interconnect layer. CB-PDMS/Ecoflex is compatible with the blade coating for facile processing, and demonstrates a similar low Young's modulus as that of the sensitive region composed of silver nanowires and PDMS. Printing processes are developed to fabricate a 4 × 9 flexible strain sensor array based on the proposed design and the interconnect layer. It is shown that the sensor with CB-PDMS/Ecoflex interconnect layer can sustain more than 3000 bending cycles. Finally, the sensor array is integrated with a flexible active-matrix organic light-emitting diode display to construct the bendable interactive surface, demonstrating the capability of controlling the ball movement via bending gestures.
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