Wearable sensors are believed to be the most important part of the Internet of Things. In order to meet the application requirements, low-dimensional materials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes have been attempted to constitute wearable sensors with high performance. Our discussions in this review include the different low-dimensional material based sensors which are employed in wearable applications. Low-dimensional materials based wearable sensors for detecting various physical quantities in surroundings, including temperature sensor, pressure or strain sensor and humidity sensor, is introduced. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of research status and future development direction of low-dimensional materials based wearable sensors. Challenges for developing commercially low-dimensional namomaterials based wearable sensors are highlighted as well.
Soft robots based on bionics have attracted extensive attention in recent years. However, most of previous works focused on the motion of robots that were incapable of communication and perception. In this work, an untethered crawling robot is proposed with integration of motion, communication, and location based entirely on a flexible material, which is capable of being utilized as a sensing platform. The hydrophilic graphene oxide film, capable of photothermal conversion, allows the robot to undergo a large deformation stimulated by near-infrared light. Conductive fabric with low resistivity and high mechanical strength, replacing the traditional rigid circuit, is utilized to complete the communication of the robot. The designed communication module allows an electrical signal to be inductively coupled to the soft robot instead of being generated by batteries or through transmission lines. The perception of the robot is demonstrated by covering sensitive materials. Furthermore, the positioning and identification of the robot are verified by an external coil array. The proposed soft crawling robot provides an innovative strategy for the integration of multifunctional robots and shows great potential in bionic devices, intelligent robots, and advanced sensors.
In this letter, we report a pressure sensing element based on the graphene–boron nitride (BN) heterostructure. The heterostructure consists of monolayer graphene sandwiched between two layers of vertically stacked dielectric BN nanofilms. The BN layers were used to protect the graphene layer from oxidation and pollution. Pressure tests were performed to investigate the characteristics of the BN–graphene–BN pressure sensing element. A sensitivity of 24.85 μV/V/mmHg is achieved in the pressure range of 130–180 kPa. After exposing the BN–graphene–BN pressure sensing element to the ambient environment for 7 days, the relative resistance change in the pressure sensing element is only 3.1%, while that of the reference open-faced graphene device without the BN protection layers is 15.7%. Thus, this strategy is promising for fabricating practical graphene pressure sensors with improved performance and stability.
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