Once the requirement of sensitivity has been met, to enable a flexible pressure sensor technology to be widely adopted as an economic and convenient way for sensing diverse human body motions, critical factors need to be considered including low manufacturing cost, a large pressure detection range, and low power consumption. In this work, a facile approach is developed for one-step processing of a large area microstructured elastomer film with high density microfeatures of air voids, which can be seamlessly integrated into the process flow for fabricating flexible capacitive sensors. The fabricated sensors exhibit fast response and high sensitivity in the low pressure range to be able to detect very weak pressure down to 1 Pa and perform reliable wrist pulse monitoring. Compared to previous work, more advantageous features of this sensor are relatively high sensitivity being maintained in a wide pressure range up to 250 kPa and excellent durability under heavy load larger than 1 MPa, attributed to the formed dense air voids inside the film. A smart insole made with the sensor can accurately monitor the real-time walking or running behaviors and even a small weight change less than 1 kg under a heavy load of a 70 kg adult. For both application examples of wrist pulse monitoring and smart insole, the sensors are operated in a 3.3 V electronic system powered by a Li-ion battery, showing the potential for power-constrained wearable applications.
Keywords: large area; microstructured PDMS film; pressure sensor; smart insole; wrist pulse monitoring.