Wearable piezoresistive strain sensor based on graphene-coated three-dimensional micro-porous PDMS sponge

Abstract

We present a highly elastic and wearable piezoresistive strain sensor based on three-dimensional, micro-porous graphene-coated polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) sponge suitable for being attached on human skin. The proposed strain sensors are simply fabricated by a sugar templating process and dip coating method based graphene ink in a facile and cost effective manner. The fabricated graphene-coated PDMS sponge shows highly stable mechanical properties in various tensile stress–strain test. A graphene thin film coated onto the backbone of PDMS sponges is used as the sensing materials of piezoresisitve strain sensors. The changes in resistance of the devices are highly stable, repeatable, and reversible when various strain is applied. Furthermore, the strain sensors show excellent sensing performance under different strain rate and mechanically robustness enough to be worked stably under repeated loads without any degradation.