Abstract
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.
Highlights
Due to the favorable flexibility and adaptability, flexible wearable electronics have exhibited enormous potential in broad prospects, and they have become one of the most attractive and rapidly growing areas of novel interdisciplinary research
This paper provides an overview of the key requirement backgrounds of various flexible sensors for numerous applications, including healthcare, wearable electronics, robotic sensing, and human body integration
Piezoresistive pressure sensors use the principle of the piezoresistive effect of strain on the material: when the pressure changes, the strain resistance produces a change proportional to the measured pressure, and the corresponding voltage output signal is obtained from the bridge circuit
Summary
Due to the favorable flexibility and adaptability, flexible wearable electronics have exhibited enormous potential in broad prospects, and they have become one of the most attractive and rapidly growing areas of novel interdisciplinary research. There is a lack of systematic summary of pressure and stress sensors and their applications in human motion detection in the last three years, especially for a comprehensive evaluation of structural performance from multiple perspectives, such as sensing mechanisms, sensing elements, substrate materials, measurement ranges, and representative applications. This paper focuses on a systematic summary of the structural properties and typical applications of stress and strain sensors for human motion detection, including the four sensing mechanisms, sensitive element, substrate materials, and main performance index. The paper mainly focuses on the most widely used physical sensors for human body detection, such as skin-like pressure and strain sensors, which are classified and compared according to sensing mechanisms, structure principles, and performance characteristics. Not limited to the above, the review is an important reference, especially for the sensors’ structural compositions, performance parameters, and numerous representative applications, such as medical health, bioelectronics, consumer electronics, human–machine integration and intelligent robotics
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
