Paper Skin Multisensory Platform for Simultaneous Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

Human skin and hair can simultaneously feel pressure, temperature, humidity, strain, and fl ow-great inspirations for applications such as artifi cial skins for burn and acid victims, robotics, and vehicular technology. Previous efforts in this direction use sophisticated materials or processes. Chemically functionalized, inkjet printed or vacuum-technology-processed papers albeit cheap have shown limited functionalities. Thus, performance and/or functionalities per cost have been limited. Here, a scalable "garage" fabrication approach is shown using off-the-shelf inexpensive household elements such as aluminum foil, scotch tapes, sticky-notes, napkins, and sponges to build "paper skin" with simultaneous real-time sensing capability of pressure, temperature, humidity, proximity, pH, and fl ow. Enabling the basic principles of porosity, adsorption, and dimensions of these materials, a fully functioning distributed sensor network platform is reported, which, for the fi rst time, can sense the vitals of its carrier (body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and skin hydration) and the surrounding environment.

One‐Step Liquid Metal Transfer Printing: Toward Fabrication of Flexible Electronics on Wide Range of Substrates

“…With the advantages of lightweight, biodegradable, easy preparation, large surface, and can be folded into 3D configurations, paper has attracted great interest and provides a highly attractive alternative to fabricate flexible electronic devices. [30] The paper sensors fabricated using conductive nanomaterials show good electrical properties, while, the electroconductivity of nonmetallic materials (carbon: 1.8 × 10 3 S m −1 , CNT: 5.03 × 10 3 S m −1 , poly (3,4ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS): 8.25 × 10 3 S m −1 ) [31] is lower than pure metal materials and the fabrication cost of nano metal ink is much higher compared to cheap paper substrate. [27] At present, various fabrications of paper electronics have been developed.…”

Freeform Compliant CMOS Electronic Systems for Internet of Everything Applications

“…Nassar et al demonstrated multisensory platform for simultaneous environmental monitoring by scalable garage fabrication using inexpensive household elements (aluminum foil, paper, napkins, sponges, and scotch-tape) and sliver ink, referred as 'paper skin' [58]. Integration of humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors array to mimic human-skin is achieved using 3D stacking of individual sensory arrays and its placement on the hand in Fig.…”

Freeform electronics for advanced healthcare

“…While CMOS technology can certainly drive down the cost, but CMOS technology alone cannot do it for every person on earth. Therefore, recently we have demonstrated household materials based wearable multi-functional skin-type flexible integrated platform which can monitor the environment with out-of-plane arrangement and body vitals with in-plane integration [7]. A comparative study shows that such wearable gadgets provide the body vitals like body temperature, heartrate, blood pressure and skin hydration data same as that of obtained from smart watches (Apple Watch and Samsung Gear) within ±5% accuracy but significantly lower cost (< $25).…”