Ultrasensitive cellular fluorocarbon piezoelectret pressure sensor for self-powered human physiological monitoring

Flexible and wearable pressure sensors are of essential importance in developing artificial electronic skin (e-skin) for areas such as healthcare monitoring and clinical diagnosis. Here, we report an ultrasensitive cellular fluorocarbon piezoelectret pressure sensor (FPS) via a three-step hot-pressing method. By constructing micron-sized voids in the inner cell, and combination with outstanding charge storage ability of the fluorocarbon electrets, tremendous piezoelectric activity can be obtained. The flexible FPS showed advantages of remarkable sensitivity (7380 pC N−1) in the subtle-pressure regime (<1 kPa), fast response time (50 ms), very low limit of detection (5 Pa) as well as high stability (30,000 cycles). In addition, the flexible and self-powered FPS owns the capability for detecting human motions such as wrist stretching, cheek motion from open-bite-open, eyes blinking and chest respiration, respectively. It can be also used for monitoring human physiological signals such as radial artery pulse wave. By virtue of easy processability in large scale, light weight, and low cost, the FPS is especially suitable for mass production and flexible electronics, indicating their promising applications in artificial intelligence and mobile healthcare monitoring systems.