Highly sensitive flexible pressure sensor based on microstructured PDMS for wearable electronics application

Abstract

Recently, wearable electronic devices have drawn increasing attentions because of the merits of high flexibility and stretchability and could be used to sense tactility, vibration, and temperature. It has been widely used in the humanoid robotics, mobile phones, and physical/chemical sensors and even human body in the past few years. Therefore, it is essential to develop pressure sensors with high flexibility over curved surface and high sensitivity in response to low-level pressure. In this study, we demonstrated an easy and low-cost method to fabricate flexible pressure sensors based on elastic microstructured polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) film which was prepared via a simple colloid self-assembly method. The flexible pressure sensors were fabricated by assembling two pieces of conductive microdome-patterned PDMS films with the conductive sides contact directly with each other. The pressure sensors show high stability and highly sensitive detection capability (-13 kPa <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> ), wide working pressure regime (0-4 kPa) and fast response (<; 100 ms). Moreover, by attaching the flexible sensors on human body, different human body motions monitoring can be realized.