Wearable strain sensors can transfer human physical motions into digital features and connect the real world to the virtual world. However, there is still a huge challenge to prepare breathable strain sensors with good sensitivity, stretchability, softness, durability, and biocompatibility, simultaneously. Herein, we employ the soft silicone elastomer as a highly stretchable substrate and propose a new strain sensor based on the carbon nanotubes@porous soft silicone elastomer (CNTs@PSSE) by salt-template-assisted and dip-coating methods. The CNTs (conductive fillers) are firmly embedded in the PSSE. The obtained sensors exhibit excellent sensitivity up to 2845.1 and a large sensing strain range of 186%. Notably, the CNTs@PSSE sensors also possess strong robustness, which can resist ultrasonic deterioration and carry out more than 10,000 high-frequency stretch-relax cycles in the presence of an obvious notch caused by the scissor. Moreover, the excellent biocompatibility indicates that the sensors can be safely attached to human skin for precisely detecting full-range human motions and being configured on smart wireless gloves for synchronous control of the bionic hand robot.
Keywords: motion monitoring; smart gloves; strain sensor; strong durability; wearable devices.