A Skin‐Like Pressure‐ and Vibration‐Sensitive Tactile Sensor Based on Polyacrylamide/Silk Fibroin Elastomer

Abstract

Abstract With bio‐integrated electronics booming, stretchable, elastic, compliance, and biocompatible elastomers attract immense research interest due to their potential to integrate with electronic devices and soft tissues. In this work, a double network skin‐like elastomer based on hydrophobic‐polyacrylamide/silk fibroin (HSF) is synthesized. The addition of the fibroin in polyacrylamide hydrogel significantly improves its stretchability, resilience, and tear resistance. Specifically, the HSF elastomer demonstrates a tensile strain as high as 1000% with the corresponding tensile stress of 0.27 MPa and great resilience (550 cycles). Based on such HSF, a hybrid mechanoreceptor sensor is fabricated, which can simultaneously implement slow adaptive and fast adaptive pulses like human skin. This device realizes the detection of a variety of human movements such as joint movement, vocalization, or pulse and high‐frequency vibration signal recognition, which demonstrates its potential applications in bio‐integrated electronics.