Wearable and Highly Sensitive Graphene Strain Sensors for Human Motion Monitoring

TLDR

Strain sensing of soft materials at small scales has attracted growing attention. This study investigates graphene woven fabrics for highly sensitive strain sensing. A flexible, wearable sensor is fabricated by adhering GWFs to a polymer–medical tape composite film, producing an ultra‑light, highly sensitive, reversible, robust device that follows skin deformation and responds to subtle motions such as clenching, phonation, expression, blink, breath, and pulse. The sensor’s high sensitivity and reversible extensibility make it suitable for displays, robotics, fatigue detection, body monitoring, and related applications.

Abstract

Sensing strain of soft materials in small scale has attracted increasing attention. In this work, graphene woven fabrics (GWFs) are explored for highly sensitive sensing. A flexible and wearable strain sensor is assembled by adhering the GWFs on polymer and medical tape composite film. The sensor exhibits the following features: ultra‐light, relatively good sensitivity, high reversibility, superior physical robustness, easy fabrication, ease to follow human skin deformation, and so on. Some weak human motions are chosen to test the notable resistance change, including hand clenching, phonation, expression change, blink, breath, and pulse. Because of the distinctive features of high sensitivity and reversible extensibility, the GWFs based piezoresistive sensors have wide potential applications in fields of the displays, robotics, fatigue detection, body monitoring, and so forth.