Polymer-based wearable nano-composite sensors: a review

Abstract

The demand for stretchable, skin-mountable, and wearable strain sensors is burgeoning because they are required for several budding applications in various emerging fields, such as health monitoring, human-machine interfaces, wearable electronics, soft robotics, human motion detection, virtual reality (VR), and so forth. Recently, strain sensors based on composite materials comprising stretchable elastomer and conductive nano-filler have gathered attention on account of their ample flexibility, record stretchability, excellent durability, customizable characteristics for strain-sensing, and simpler fabrication techniques. This quality write-up discusses current developments in the field of flexible strain sensors (FSSs). We effectively summarized how advanced mechanisms, such as crack propagation, disconnection, and tunneling effect, which are quite different from traditional strain sensing techniques, are used to develop FSS. Various factors and their effects that need to be kept in mind while developing high-performance, high-quality FSSs are also debated. The performance of recently reported FSSs is comprehensively discussed, and the huge potential that FSSs hold has been comprehensively reviewed in this survey.