Low-cost highly sensitive strain sensors for wearable electronics

Abstract

Wearable strain sensors have attracted a great amount of attention for their plethora of potential applications, triggering ever growing interest in the search for low-cost materials and obtaining highly sensitive sensors. In this work, novel, flexible and highly sensitive strain sensors were fabricated using graphite granular films deposited on flexible substrates (PET, polyethylene terephthalate) by low-cost carbon-evaporation. The strain sensors show a fast response time of ≤140 ms, a high gauge factor (GF) of 1813, and a long durability of over 10 000 bending cycles. These low-cost, highly sensitive strain sensors have huge potential for applications in wearable electronics for health monitoring.