Carbon nanotube/nonwoven fabric-based electronic skins for smart clothing and electronic glove

Abstract

In recent years, flexible, easy-to-fabricate, and low-cost electronic skins (E-skins) have attracted considerable attention, due to their enormous demand in wearable device applications. Based on a carbon nanotube (CNT)/nonwoven fabric, three types of E-skins were fabricated using a low-cost and scalable approach, and detected various signals, like pressure, stretch, flexion, temperature, and humidity. Due to the wrinkled and porous microstructure of CNT/nonwoven fabric, the pressure-sensitive E-skin demonstrates a high gauge factor (GF) value of 19.12 kPa-1 and 5.38 kPa-1 with a pressure range of 15–6125 Pa and 6125–12005 Pa, respectively. Unlike traditional paper-based E-skins, the stretch/flexion/temperature-sensitive E-skin could detect the stretch strain, and its GF values were 3.81, 0.51 rad-1, and 1.4×10-3 ℃-1 for the detection of stretch, flexion and temperature. For the humidity-sensitive E-skin, its GF value was calculated to be 2.8×10-2 and 0.20 with the relative humidity range of 55–75% and 75–95%. The favorable performance of the E-skins allows their integration into smart clothing, where they successfully monitored human motion, physiological and external environmental signals in real time. Furthermore, the prepared E-skins have also been integrated into an electronic glove, where they simultaneously detected the bending and pressure signals of human fingers, demonstrating application potential in the field of telediagnosis.