Advanced Flexible Skin-Like Pressure and Strain Sensors for Human Health Monitoring

• Main Authors: Xu Liu, Yuan Wei, Yuanying Qiu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Series: Micromachines
• Subjects: flexible sensors; electronic skin; human monitoring; wearable electronic; pressure and strain; structure characteristic
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-666X/12/6/695

Recently, owing to their excellent flexibility and adaptability, skin-like pressure and strain sensors integrated with the human body have the potential for great prospects in healthcare. This review mainly focuses on the representative advances of the flexible pressure and strain sensors for health monitoring in recent years. The review consists of five sections. Firstly, we give a brief introduction of flexible skin-like sensors and their primary demands, and we comprehensively outline the two categories of design strategies for flexible sensors. Secondly, combining the typical sensor structures and their applications in human body monitoring, we summarize the recent development of flexible pressure sensors based on perceptual mechanism, the sensing component, elastic substrate, sensitivity and detection range. Thirdly, the main structure principles and performance characteristic parameters of noteworthy flexible strain sensors are summed up, namely the sensing mechanism, sensitive element, substrate, gauge factor, stretchability, and representative applications for human monitoring. Furthermore, the representations of flexible sensors with the favorable biocompatibility and self-driven properties are introduced. Finally, in conclusion, besides continuously researching how to enhance the flexibility and sensitivity of flexible sensors, their biocompatibility, versatility and durability should also be given sufficient attention, especially for implantable bioelectronics. In addition, the discussion emphasizes the challenges and opportunities of the above highlighted characteristics of novel flexible skin-like sensors.