Paper/Carbon Nanotube-Based Wearable Pressure Sensor for Physiological Signal Acquisition and Soft Robotic Skin

A wearable and flexible pressure sensor is essential to the realization of personalized medicine through continuously monitoring an individual’s state of health and also the development of a highly intelligent robot. A flexible, wearable pressure sensor is fabricated based on novel single-wall carbon nanotube /tissue paper through a low-cost and scalable approach. The flexible, wearable sensor showed superior performance with concurrence of several merits, including high sensitivity for a broad pressure range and an ultralow energy consumption level of 10^–6 W. Benefited from the excellent performance and the ultraconformal contact of the sensor with an uneven surface, vital human physiological signals (such as radial arterial pulse and muscle activity at various positions) can be monitored in real time and in situ. In addition, the pressure sensors could also be integrated onto robots as the artificial skin that could sense the force/pressure and also the distribution of force/pressure on the artificial skin

Electrospinning-Derived “Hairy Seaweed” and Its Photoelectrochemical Properties

Highly porous three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical nanostructures suspended in aqueous media were facilely prepared via electrospinning of polyacrylonitrile (PAN)/indium tin oxide (ITO) nanofibers and collection of the hybrid nanofibers by water, followed by hydrothermally growing ZnO nanorods from the nanofibers. The large interfiber distances facilitated the uniform growth of the ZnO nanorods throughout the whole system. The suspended PAN/ITO nanofibers process excellent light trapping capability due to their centimeter-sized dimensions and hence large light penetration path. This significantly increases the probability of multiple-reflections, leading to high absorption with almost zero transmission when the size of the sample reaches 10 mm in the direction parallel to incident light. High photocurrent was generated when the nanorods-on-nanofibers was used as a photoanode. The high photocurrent density generated by the anode can be attributed to its excellent light-trapping capability brought by the large amount of interaction sites between the ZnO nanorods and light, its large contact area with electrolyte, as well as the conduction path constructed by high-content ITO nanoparticles