Mimicking the pressure-sensing behavior of biological skins using electronic devices has profound implications for prosthetics and medicine. The developed electronic skins based on single response mode for pressure sensing suffer from a rapid decrease in sensitivity with the increase of pressure. Their highly sensitive range covers a narrow part of tolerable pressure range of the human skin and has a weak response to the injurious high pressures. Herein, inspired by a bioluminescent jellyfish, we develop an electronic skin with dual-mode response characteristics, which is able to quantify and map the static and dynamic pressures by combining electrical and optical responses. The electronic skin shows notable changes in capacitance in the low-pressure regime and can emit bright luminescence in the high-pressure regime, which, respectively, imitates the functions of the mechanoreceptors and nociceptors in the biological skin, enabling it to sense gentle tactile and injurious pressure with sensitivities up to 0.66 and 0.044 kPa, respectively. The complementary highly sensitive sensing ranges of the electronic skin realize a reliable perception to different levels of pressure, and its mechanically robust and stretchable properties may find a wide range of applications in intelligent robots.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.