Stretchable, Skin-Breathable, and Ultrasensitive Respiration Sensor Using Graphite on Paper With Smart Structures

Abstract

Healthy sleep is an important indicator of good physical and mental health. The current technology employed for monitoring sleep quality is typically expensive and invasive, which demands innovations in respiration monitoring. In addition, recent effort in developing wearable respiration sensors has faced great challenges in concurrently obtaining low cost, high stretchability, and high sensitivity. Herein, we demonstrate a simple fabrication strategy to construct low-cost, stretchable, skin-breathable and ultrasensitive respiration sensors using pencil drawing, electrode pasting, and laser cutting methods. With smart designs, the sensors exhibited high sensitivity, good stability, decent skin-breathability and capability to detect respiration rate and depth in real-time. The sensors fabricated by the simple low-cost method in this study can be utilized to measure sleep quality, providing warning signals for apnea and sleep disorders. The proposed technology holds promise for developing cost-effective wearable ultrasensitive sensors for sleep quality monitoring.