Screen-Printable Iontronic Pressure Sensor with Thermal Expansion Microspheres for Pulse Monitoring

Constructing microstructures to improve the sensitivity of flexible pressure sensors is an effective approach. However, the preparation of microstructures usually involves inverted molds or subtractive manufacturing methods, which are difficult in large-scale (e.g., in screen printing) preparation. To solve this problem, we introduced thermally expandable microspheres for screen printing to fabricate flexible sensors. Thermally expandable microspheres can be constructed into microstructures by simple heating after printing, which simplifies the microstructure fabrication step. In addition, the added microspheres can also be used as ionic liquid reservoir materials to further increase the capacitance change and improve the sensitivity. The prepared sensors exhibited superior performance, including ultrahigh sensitivity (Smax = 49999.5 kPa–1) and wide detection range (0–350 kPa). Even after 30,000 cycles at a high pressure of 300 kPa and a low pressure of 30 kPa, the sensor showed minimal signal degradation, demonstrating long-term cycling stability. In order to verify the practical potential of the sensors, we performed human radial artery beat detection experiments using these sensors. The variations in the intensity of the 3D radial artery pulse wave can be observed very clearly, which is important for human health monitoring. The above demonstrates that our strategy can provide an effective approach for the large-scale preparation of high-performance flexible pressure sensors.