The Advent Of "Flexible Era" Will Lead To The Development Of Flexible Wearable Sensors In The Direction Of Industrialization.

As an important part of flexible mobile phones, flexible wearable sensors are developing from basic research to industrialization.

Local time February 24th, Barcelona, Spain, HUAWEI folding smart phone "Mate X" with the price of up to 2299 euros (17 thousand yuan), appeared in the expectation of the world mobile communication conference (MWC).

Previously, Sofi, Samsung and Xiaomi also demonstrated their folding mobile phones.

The "flexible era" is coming. The folding screen will become one of the hot spots of the mobile phone market in 2019, and become the consensus of the industry.

"The general public's understanding is that the folding mobile phone is the screen is a flexible cell phone, but this is not the case."

In an interview recently, Shen Guo Zhen, a researcher at the National Key Laboratory of semiconductor superlattices at the semiconductor Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "if you want to achieve folding and bending at any angle of the cell phone, all devices on the cell phone should have this function."

As an important part of flexible mobile phones, flexible wearable sensors are developing from basic research to industrialization.

Application driven development

In Shen Guozhen's business card, there is such a line: "research interest: low dimensional semiconductor materials and flexible electronic devices."

In 2009, when the United States returned to school, Shen Guozhen focused on flexible electronic devices as a research focus. He started from flexible batteries and dabbled in many applications such as flexible pistors, sensors and other wearable electronics.

Among them, the flexible wearable sensors for artificial intelligence and health monitoring have always been the focus of their team research. Research results on flexible tactile sensing, flexible imaging array, biosensor, gas sensing and multi-functional sensor integration have been published in academic journals such as advanced materials, Chinese science, and so on.

"Our work in these years is driven by demand, and the corresponding research and development work is carried out according to the application scenarios of flexible sensors."

Shen Guozhen concluded.

As one of the authors of a recent paper on flexible and pparent capacitive pressure sensors published in Chinese science, Shen Guozhen, a team member and Associate Research Fellow of the State Key Laboratory of semiconductor superlattice, Institute of semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, "China Science Daily" introduced in detail the humidity sensors and data glove they developed, and the process of many wearable flexible sensors such as the piano gloves to be published.

He told reporters that with the continuous progress of information technology, people's demand for developing high-performance flexible sensors is also increasing.

People hope that sensors can be comfortably worn on the body, or directly attached to the skin surface, so that they can get a series of health information such as blood pressure, blood sugar, pulse and so on, and collect these information into intelligent equipment. After analysis and extraction, they can help doctors diagnose.

In addition, by attaching the corresponding flexible sensor and sensing system on the human prosthesis or robot, we can realize the perception of the external environment and obtain the super control of multi degree of freedom.

All these make future human life more imaginative.

"Because of this, the research of flexible electronics has been very hot in recent years.

Many people are starting to enter this field, which is a good thing, which is very important for the development and industrialization of the field.

Shen Guozhen said.

However, he cautioned that "in the field of academic research, we should not pursue too much enthusiasm, especially young researchers. We should take root in a certain field and work hard and accumulate necessary scientific research."

From sensitivity to pparency

The future development direction of information technology is to integrate the human and external information interaction, so as to achieve the comprehensive and efficient utilization of the physical world, information data and human social resources.

Based on this goal, they gradually improve their sensitivity, stability and uniformity from the performance of flexible sensors, and further expand their functions based on this, so that they have more pparency, biocompatibility, stretchability, self-healing and other properties.

Take their recent published papers on flexible and pparent capacitive pressure sensors in Chinese science as an example.

In this achievement, supported by the natural science foundation, they successfully developed a flexible pparent capacitive pressure sensor based on the special microstructure silver nanowire /PDMS composite dielectric layer material.

Compared with the pure PDMS planar dielectric device, the microstructured sensor has higher sensitivity, lower detection range, and better stability and durability.

In addition, in the paper, they also discussed the enhancement sensing mechanism of conductive filler content and microstructure, and developed a 5 x 5 sensor array for flexible and pparent wearable touch keyboard system.

For wearable electronic devices, pressure sensors with high sensitivity and fast response are very important for simple fabrication technology.

"Our research results show that pressure sensors have good application prospects in the future electronic skin field."

Lou Zheng said.

In recent years, with the combination of biomaterials and flexible electronic technology, the establishment of new functional micro nano structures, devices and integrated systems with natural materials as important materials has become one of the most important research fronts of flexible electronics.

In this regard, they worked with Jilin University associate professor Wang Lili to summarize the progress and challenges of plant based functional materials applied in green electronic skin. From the perspective of biological properties of plant materials, we prospected their future development and commercialization as supporting materials, active units and structural templates.

The research results were published in last year's advanced functional materials.

"In the field of flexible device research, academic circles both at home and abroad are mainly in the basic research stage, and there is no obvious difference."

Talking about the development of flexible sensors at this stage, Lou Zheng told China Science Daily.

For example, how flexible sensors simulate human nerves is becoming a frontier field, and Chinese scholars have begun to do so.

Industrialization progressively promoted

Although the prospects for the application of flexible wearable sensors are full of confidence, Shen Guozhen and Lou Zheng did not deny the challenges they face in terms of industrialization.

The research results of "flexible wearable sensors" also have a process from laboratory to product.

Lou Zheng told the China Science Daily that in terms of technology itself, the stability and wear resistance of sensors themselves need further improvement.

From the supporting of the whole industry chain, flexible circuits, flexible storage, and soft and hard links must be kept up.

"Generally speaking, if we want to make large-scale industrialization, the whole industry chain should be more mature."

Shen Guozhen also believes that it is difficult to turn all devices into flexible devices.

However, different scenarios require different flexible technologies, so they can be pushed forward step by step according to people's needs, such as flexibility in pulse sensors.

In this regard, Shen Guozhen is looking forward to cooperation with enterprises.

However, he believes that in view of the practical difficulties in the pfer and pformation of scientific and technological achievements in China, Chinese enterprises should embark on the long-term development and increase investment in scientific research in the front-end links such as small and pilot tests, so as to ensure that the results reach the mass production stage and finally achieve large-scale industrialization.