Highly Stretchable, Self-Healable, Ultrasensitive Strain and Proximity Sensors Based on Skin-Inspired Conductive Film for Human Motion Monitoring

Recently, flexible electronics have been paid great attention due to their unique characteristics, such as high stretchability, arbitrary bending, and recoverable deformation. As a core component, flexible conductive materials with skin-like properties are desirable and valuable for the development of flexible electronics. However, the integration of skin-like mechanical properties, inherent self-healing ability, ultrahigh sensitivity, and electrical conductivity into one material is difficult to be realized. Here, this study reports a kind of conductive film (PAM-dc-fGO) fabricated by cross-linking intrinsic self-repair polyazomethine (PAM) and ethylenediamine-functionalized graphene oxide (fGO) through dynamic covalent bonds (imine bonds, -CH=N-). The as-prepared conductive films exhibit skin-like mechanical properties with a stretchability of 212-275% and elastic moduli of 0.76-4.23 MPa. In addition, the healing efficiency in mechanical properties of the 24 h healed specimen can restore up to 99%, and the healing efficiency in terms of electrical conductivity still maintains above 95% after five breaking/healing cycles, indicating an excellent capability of self-repair. Due to the ultrahigh sensing sensitivity with the gauge factor (GF) of 641, the PAM-dc-fGO film-based strain sensor can precisely detect the weak signals from the human body. Moreover, the remote monitoring of human motions with a long distance of about 100 cm has been successfully conducted by a PAM-dc-fGO proximity sensor. This work provides a new path for the development of multifunctional soft materials, and the sensors show great potential in health diagnoses and security protection applications.