Fabrication and performance of full textile-based flexible piezoresistive pressure sensor

With the development of wearable devices, wearable sensing systems for detecting human movement have attracted considerable attention of academic and industrial fields. Among them, the piezoresistive pressure sensor with high sensitivity, excellent stability, low cost, and large-area fabrication process is one of the research hotspots. In this paper, we designed a full textile piezoresistive pressure sensor with an interdigitated printed silver paste cotton fabric electrode as a bottom and a piezoresistive layer of silver nanowire-coated cotton fabric as a top electrode and the bottom and the top electrodes were encapsulated by a VHB adhesive film. Further the performances of the pressure sensor were investigated. The results show that the piezoresistive pressure sensor achieves high sensitivity of 2.56 x 10(4)-4.42 x 10(6) Pa-1 when the sheet resistance of the piezoresistive layer changes from 1.51-0.09 ohm sq(-1), the outstanding switching ratio of 10(7), the fast response time (6 ms), and relaxation properties (4 ms) to instantaneous pressure of 50 Pa. The detect changes in the signal of repeated bending of fingers and wrists show excellent repeatability and detection performance, suggesting its potential application in wearable controller and motion detection.

Automated summary

In this paper, a full textile piezoresistive pressure sensor with high sensitivity and excellent stability was designed, showing potential applications in wearable controller and motion detection. The sensor achieved a fast response time and demonstrated good performance in detecting finger and wrist movements.