Wearable and stretchable sensors are important components
to strictly
monitor the behavior and health of humans and attract extensive attention.
However, traditional sensors are designed with pure horseshoes or
chiral metamaterials, which restrict the biological tissue engineer
applications due to their narrow regulation ranges of the elastic
modulus and the poorly adjustable Poisson’s ratio. Inspired
by the biological spiral microstructure, a dual-phase metamaterial
(chiral-horseshoes) is designed and fabricated in this work, which
possesses wide and programmable mechanical properties by tailoring
the geometrical parameters. Experimental, numerical, and theoretical
studies are conducted, which reveal that the designed microstructures
can reproduce mechanical properties of most natural animals such as
frogs, snakes, and rabbits skin. Furthermore, a flexible strain sensor
with the gauge factor reaching 2 under 35% strain is fabricated, which
indicates that the dual-phase metamaterials have a stable monitoring
ability and can be potentially applied in the electronic skin. Finally,
the flexible strain sensor is attached on the human skin, and it can
successfully monitor the physiological behavior signals under various
actions. In addition, the dual-phase metamaterial could combine with
artificial intelligence algorithms to fabricate a flexible stretchable
display. The dual-phase metamaterial with negative Poisson’s
ratio could decrease the lateral shrinkage and image distortion during
the stretching process. This study offers a strategy for designing
the flexible strain sensors with programmable, tunable mechanical
properties, and the fabricated soft and high-precision wearable strain
sensor can accurately monitor the skin signals under different human
motions and potentially be applied for flexible display.
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.