Highly sensitive, stretchable, and transparent multidirectional wearable strain sensors based on patterned vertical graphene array

Abstract Since traditional uniaxial strain sensors constructed from isotropic materials mainly focus on identifying strain amplitude without the information of strain direction, multidimensional strain sensors are critical for capturing complex movements, such as human motions. Here, we propose a highly sensitive, stretchable, and transparent multidirectional strain sensor based on patterned vertical graphene array (PVGA) synthesized by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition followed by selective etching and transferring. The obtained PVGA/Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) strain sensor exhibits outstanding anisotropic strain sensing performance, including high gauge factor (GF = 85.8 at 10% strain), excellent linearity ( R 2 = 0.99), and outstanding selectivity ( |▽| = 4.17). Cross-plied PVGA/PDMS strain sensors are also fabricated to demonstrate the application of detecting joint movements of the human body, as well as monitoring wrist motion for controlling a fruit-slicer game in the virtual environment. The sensor’s remarkable multi-dimensional sensing performance confirms their significant potential for diverse applications, notably in wearable electronics, such as personal health sensing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and soft robotics.