Graphene Textile Strain Sensor with Negative Resistance Variation for Human Motion Detection

Abstract

Recently, wearable devices have attracted a significantly increased interest in human motion detection and human physiological signal monitoring. Currently, it is still a great challenge to fabricate strain sensors with high performance and well-fitting the human body. In this work, we fabricated a close-fitting and wearable graphene textile strain sensor based on graphene textile without polymer encapsulation. The graphene oxide acts as a colorant to dye the polyester fabrics and is reduced at high temperature, which endows the graphene textile strain sensor with excellent performance. Compared with the previously reported strain sensors, our strain sensor exhibits a distinctive negative resistance variation with strain increasing. In addition, the sensor also demonstrates fascinating performance, including high sensitivity, long-term stability and great comfort. Based on its superior performance, the graphene textile strain sensor can be knitted on clothing for detecting both subtle and large human motions, showing the tremendous potential for applications in wearable electronics.