Ultra‐Robust and Extensible Fibrous Mechanical Sensors for Wearable Smart Healthcare

TLDR

High‑strength, highly stretchable fibrous materials are essential for durable wearable electronics, yet producing fibers that combine both properties remains challenging. The study develops ultra‑robust (~17.6 MPa) and highly extensible (~700 %) conducting microfibers and demonstrates their use in fabricating fibrous mechanical sensors. The authors fabricated conducting microfibers with ~17.6 MPa tensile strength and ~700 % elongation, enabling the construction of fibrous mechanical sensors. The resulting sensor achieves high sensitivity across a 0.0075 %–400 % strain range, detects low‑frequency vibrations up to 40 Hz, and enables a wearable health‑monitoring system that tracks muscle movement, tremors, pulse, respiration, gestures, and posture for disease prediction and diagnosis.

Abstract

Fibrous material with high strength and large stretchability is an essential component of high-performance wearable electronic devices. Wearable electronic systems require a material that is strong to ensure durability and stability, and a wide range of strain to expand their applications. However, it is still challenging to manufacture fibrous materials with simultaneously high mechanical strength and the tensile property. Herein, the ultra-robust (≈17.6 MPa) and extensible (≈700%) conducting microfibers are developed and demonstrated their applications in fabricating fibrous mechanical sensors. The mechanical sensor shows high sensitivity in detecting strains that have high strain resolution and a large detection range (from 0.0075% to 400%) simultaneously. Moreover, low frequency vibrations between 0 and 40 Hz are also detected, which covers most tremors that occur in the human body. As a further step, a wearable and smart health-monitoring system has been developed using the fibrous mechanical sensor, which is capable of monitoring health-related physiological signals, including muscle movement, body tremor, wrist pulse, respiration, gesture, and six body postures to predict and diagnose diseases, which will promote the wearable telemedicine technology.