Development and Analysis of Graphene Nanoplatelets (GNPs)-Based Flexible Strain Sensor for Health Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Recently, flexible electronic devices have gained tremendous research interest owing to their wide range of applications such as human motion detection, health monitoring and electronic skin (E-Skin). Particularly, the development of skin-like flexible strain sensors is gradually increasing for the realization of multipurpose human-machine interfaces. This paper aims to propose a simple method of manufacturing flexible graphene-based strain sensors with high sensitivity. Herein, a novel flexible resistive-strain sensor based on graphene nanoplatelets (GNP)/PDMS has been reported that provides good strain sensitivity, stretchability up to 65% with a gauge factor of 62.5, indicating typical piezo-resistive characteristics. The fabricated sensor is attached to the human body, it works as a health-monitoring device by detecting various human motions such as human wrist pulse measurement, the finger bending movement and in addition to the flexible pipe bending. This work presents fabrication, characterization and comparative study of four different types of GNP wrist pulse sensors. Therefore, with its simple structure and low cost processing coupled with reasonably good piezo-resistive behavior, it has great potential in wearable electronics, viz. human motion detection and health monitoring applications.