Flexible,
breathable, and degradable pressure sensors with excellent
sensing performance are drawing tremendous attention for various practical
applications in wearable artificial skins, healthcare monitoring,
and artificial intelligence due to their flexibility, breathability,
lightweight, decreased electronic rubbish, and environmentally friendly
impact. However, traditional plastic or elastomer substrates with
impermeability, uncomfortableness, mechanical mismatches, and nondegradability
greatly
restricted their practical applications. Therefore, the fabrication
of such pressure sensors with high flexibility, facile degradability,
and breathability is still a critical challenge and highly desired.
Herein, we present a wearable, breathable, degradable, and highly
sensitive MXene/protein nanocomposites-based pressure sensor. The
fabricated MXene/protein-based pressure sensor is assembled from a
breathable conductive MXene coated silk fibroin nanofiber (MXene-SF)
membrane and a silk fibroin nanofiber membrane patterned with a MXene
ink-printed (MXene ink-SF) interdigitated electrode, which can serve
as the sensing layer and the electrode layer, respectively. The assembled
pressure sensor exhibits a wide sensing range (up to 39.3 kPa), high
sensitivity (298.4 kPa–1 for 1.4–15.7 kPa;
171.9 kPa–1 for 15.7–39.3 kPa), fast response/recovery
time (7/16 ms), reliable breathability, excellent cycling stability
over 10 000 cycles, good biocompatibility, and robust degradability.
Furthermore, it shows great sensing performance in monitoring human
psychological signals, acting as an artificial skin for the quantitative
illustration of pressure distribution, and wireless biomonitoring
in real time. Considering the biodegradable and breathable features,
the sensor may become promising to find potential applications in
smart electronic skins, human motion detection, disease diagnosis,
and human–machine interaction.