A Highly Stretchable Nanofiber-Based Electronic Skin with Pressure-, Strain-, and Flexion-Sensitive Properties for Health and Motion Monitoring

• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b07935
• Publication Date: 2017-09-11T11:56:51Z
• Authors: Kun Qi; Jianxin He; Hongbo Wang; Yuman Zhou; Xiaolu You; Nan Nan; Weili Shao; Lidan Wang; Bin Ding; Shizhong Cui
• Keywords: Wearable Electronic Devices; Polyurethanes; Nanofibers; Pressure; Humans; Graphite; 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology

The development of flexible and stretchable electronic skins that can mimic the complex characteristics of natural skin is of great value for applications in human motion detection, healthcare, speech recognition, and robotics. In this work, we propose an efficient and low-cost fabrication strategy to construct a highly sensitive and stretchable electronic skin that enables the detection of dynamic and static pressure, strain, and flexion based on an elastic graphene oxide (GO)-doped polyurethane (PU) nanofiber membrane with an ultrathin conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) coating layer. The three-dimensional porous elastic GO-doped PU@PEDOT composite nanofibrous substrate and the continuous self-assembled conductive pathway in the nanofiber-based electronic skin offer more contact sites, a larger deformation space, and a reversible capacity for pressure and strain sensing, which provide multimodal mechanical sensing capabilities with high sensitivity and a wide sensing range. The nanofiber-based electronic skin sensor demonstrates a high pressure sensitivity (up to 20.6 kPa-1), a broad sensing range (1 Pa to 20 kPa), excellent cycling stability and repeatability (over 10,000 cycles), and a high strain sensitivity over a wide range (up to approximately 550%). We confirmed the applicability of the nanofiber-based electronic skin to pulse monitoring, expression, voice recognition, and the full range of human motion, demonstrating its potential use in wearable human-health monitoring systems.