Abstract
Transparent and conducting flexible electrodes have been successfully developed over the last few decades due to their potential applications in optoelectronics. However, recent developments in smart electronics, such as a direct human-machine interface, health-monitoring devices, motion-tracking sensors, and artificially electronic skin also require materials with multifunctional properties such as transparency, flexibility and good portability. In such devices, there remains room to develop transparent and flexible devices such as pressure sensors or temperature sensors. Herein, we demonstrate a fully transparent and flexible bimodal sensor using indium tin oxide (ITO), which is embedded in a plastic substrate. For the proposed pressure sensor, the embedded ITO is detached from its Mayan-pyramid-structured silicon mold by an environmentally friendly method which utilizes water-soluble sacrificial layers. The Mayan-pyramid-based pressure sensor is capable of six different pressure sensations with excellent sensitivity in the range of 100 Pa-10 kPa, high endurance of 105 cycles, and good pulse detection and tactile sensing data processing capabilities through machine learning (ML) algorithms for different surface textures. A 5 × 5-pixel pressure-temperature-based bimodal sensor array with a zigzag-shaped ITO temperature sensor on top of it is also demonstrated without a noticeable interface effect. This work demonstrates the potential to develop transparent bimodal sensors that can be employed for electronic skin (E-skin) applications.
Highlights
One form of new electronic technology to monitor human health in the form of smart robots or humanoids with a range of different electronic sensors is known as electronic skin, or E-skin
Microstructure pressure sensors are fabricated by the direct deposition of conducting materials onto a PDMS mold[7,8,9,33,34], possibly leading to an adhesion problem between the conducting material and the PDMS
The flexible integrity of the film with the indium tin oxide (ITO) embedded into the PDMS substrate compared to ITO film directly deposited onto PDMS was estimated by outer and inner bending and by measuring the relative resistance change (R/Ro), where R is the resistance change after bending and Ro is the initial resistance
Summary
One form of new electronic technology to monitor human health in the form of smart robots or humanoids with a range of different electronic sensors is known as electronic skin, or E-skin. Less interest has been shown with regard to transparent and conducting metal oxides in flexible bimodal sensors due to their requirement of high-temperature processing and their rigidness[21,22]. ITO is deposited by radio-frequency sputtering (RF sputtering) onto water-soluble sacrificial layers and separated from this substrate using hot water Using this simple technique, we fabricated Mayan-pyramid-shaped ITO which was embedded into PDMS as a piezo-resistive pressure sensor. We fabricated Mayan-pyramid-shaped ITO which was embedded into PDMS as a piezo-resistive pressure sensor These pressure sensors show an excellent working range of pressure detection (100 Pa to 10kPa), high endurance of 10000 cycles, and rapid response and recovery times of approximately 120 ms and 80 ms, respectively. We demonstrated a 5 × 5 pixel transparent and flexible bimodal sensor array by applying both pressure and temperature simultaneously in real time
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