1 Soft Robotics and Biodesign Lab, Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
2 State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Soft Robot. 2019 Jun;6(3):368-376. doi: 10.1089/soro.2018.0116. Epub 2019 Mar 8.
Skin-like stretchable sensors with the flexible and soft inorganic/organic electronics have many promising potentials in wearable devices, soft robotics, prosthetics, and health monitoring equipment. Hydrogels with ionic conduction, akin to the biological skin, provide an alternative for soft and stretchable sensor design. However, fully integrated and wearable sensing skin with ionically conductive hydrogel for hand-motion monitoring has not been achieved. In this article, we report a wearable soft ionotronic skin (iSkin) system integrating multichannel stretchable and transparent hydrogel-elastomer hybrid ionic sensors and a wireless electronic control module. The ionic sensor is of resistive type and fabricated by curing ionic hydrogel precursor on a benzophenone-treated preshaped elastomer to form a hydrogel-elastomer hybrid structure. The hydrogel-elastomer hybrid iSkin is highly stretchable (∼300% strain), transparent (∼95% transmittance in the visible light range), and lightweight (<22 g). Experiments demonstrate that the fully integrated iSkin system can conformably attach onto the dexterous hands for recognizing the joint proprioception and hand gesture, and understanding the sign language. Our iSkin system would also provide a test bed for customized material selection and construction in a variety of applications.
具有灵活柔软的无机/有机电子器件的类皮肤可拉伸传感器在可穿戴设备、软机器人、假肢和健康监测设备方面具有很大的应用潜力。类似于生物皮肤的具有离子传导性的水凝胶为软、可拉伸传感器的设计提供了一种替代方案。然而，具有离子传导性水凝胶的完全集成的、可穿戴的用于手部运动监测的传感皮肤尚未实现。在本文中，我们报告了一种可穿戴的软离子电子皮肤（iSkin）系统，该系统集成了多通道可拉伸透明水凝胶-弹性体混合离子传感器和无线电子控制模块。离子传感器为电阻式，通过在经苯甲酮处理的预成型弹性体上固化离子水凝胶前体来制备，形成水凝胶-弹性体混合结构。水凝胶-弹性体混合 iSkin 具有高拉伸性（约 300%应变）、高透明度（可见光范围内约 95%的透光率）和低重量（<22 克）。实验表明，完全集成的 iSkin 系统可以贴合在灵巧的手上，用于识别关节本体感觉和手势，并理解手语。我们的 iSkin 系统还将为各种应用中的定制材料选择和构建提供一个测试平台。
