Graphene-Paper Pressure Sensor for Detecting Human Motions

TLDR

Pressure sensors for wearable applications require high sensitivity in the 0–20 kPa range, yet traditional designs cannot simultaneously achieve high sensitivity and a large working range, creating a need for breakthrough sensors. The study proposes a graphene‑paper pressure sensor designed to operate with excellent sensitivity across 0–20 kPa. The sensor is fabricated from graphene paper, enabling high sensitivity and a wide 0–20 kPa range. The sensor outperforms most reported graphene pressure sensors by optimizing sensitivity and working range, and it successfully detects pulse, respiration, voice, and intense motions, indicating strong potential for smart wearable health monitoring.

Abstract

Pressure sensors should have an excellent sensitivity in the range of 0–20 kPa when applied in wearable applications. Traditional pressure sensors cannot achieve both a high sensitivity and a large working range simultaneously, which results in their limited applications in wearable fields. There is an urgent need to develop a pressure sensor to make a breakthrough in both sensitivity and working range. In this paper, a graphene-paper pressure sensor that shows excellent performance in the range of 0–20 kPa is proposed. Compared to most reported graphene pressure sensors, this work realizes the optimization of sensitivity and working range, which is especially suitable for wearable applications. We also demonstrate that the pressure sensor can be applied in pulse detection, respiratory detection, voice recognition, as well as various intense motion detections. This graphene-paper pressure sensor will have great potentials for smart wearable devices to achieve health monitoring and motion detection.