Progress and prospects in flexible tactile sensors

Abstract

Flexible tactile sensors have the advantages of large deformation detection, high fault tolerance, and excellent conformability, which enable conformal integration onto the complex surface of human skin for long-term bio-signal monitoring. The breakthrough of flexible tactile sensors rather than conventional tactile sensors greatly expanded application scenarios. Flexible tactile sensors are applied in fields including not only intelligent wearable devices for gaming but also electronic skins, disease diagnosis devices, health monitoring devices, intelligent neck pillows, and intelligent massage devices in the medical field; intelligent bracelets and metaverse gloves in the consumer field; as well as even brain–computer interfaces. Therefore, it is necessary to provide an overview of the current technological level and future development of flexible tactile sensors to ease and expedite their deployment and to make the critical transition from the laboratory to the market. This paper discusses the materials and preparation technologies of flexible tactile sensors, summarizing various applications in human signal monitoring, robotic tactile sensing, and human–machine interaction. Finally, the current challenges on flexible tactile sensors are also briefly discussed, providing some prospects for future directions.

Increasing the sensor channels: a solution for the pressing offsets that cause the physiological parameter inaccuracy in radial artery pulse signal acquisition

“…However, these single-channel sensors only adopt single temporal pulse signals without spatial information to show pulse-feeling patterns ( Kim et al, 2011 ; Kim et al, 2012 ; Huang et al, 2019 ). In recent years, multi-channel pulse signals have been widely measured using tactile sensors for pulse signal application studies ( Chung et al, 2011 ; Kong et al, 2016 ; Peng et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2023 ). The multi-channel arterial pulse signals, also named as three-dimensional pulse images (3DPIs), provide the three-dimensional spatial and temporal characteristics of pulse signals ( Peng et al, 2019 ).…”