Hydrophobic and Stable MXene-Polymer Pressure Sensors for Wearable Electronics

Ti3C2Tx MXene has exhibited great potential for use in wearable devices, especially as pressure sensors, due to its lamellar structure, which changes its resistance as a function of interlayer distance. Despite the good performance of the reported pure MXene pressure sensors, their practical applications are limited by moderate flexibility, excessively high MXene conductivity, and environmental effects. To address the above challenges, we incorporated multilayer MXene particles into hydrophobic poly(vinylidene fluoride) trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE)) and prepared freestanding, flexible, and stable films via spin-coating. These films were assembled into highly sensitive piezoresistive pressure sensors, which show a fast response time of 16 ms in addition to excellent long-term stability with no obvious responsivity attenuation when the sensor is exposed to air, even after 20 weeks. Moreover, the fabricated sensors could monitor human physiological signals such as knee bending and cheek bulging and could be used for speech recognition. The mapping spatial pressure distribution function was also demonstrated by the designed 10 x 10 integrated pressure sensor array platform.