A dual-mode electronic skin textile for pressure and temperature sensing

Flexible electronic skin is highly desired to realize the real-time tactile sensing and smart health assessment for human beings. Nevertheless, it is still a huge challenge to develop multifunctional electronic skin for human activity monitoring and body temperature detection in a single device without sensory interference. Here, a dual-mode electronic skin was obtained by vertically integrating the pressure sensing layer and temperature sensing layer within the same textile. The textile is composed of piezoelectric polyvinylidene fluoride nanofibrous membrane doped with zinc oxide nanoparticles (PVDF/ZnO NFM) and flexible thermal-resistance carbon nanofibers (CNFs). This all-in-one electronic skin textile can precisely perform pressure perception and temperature detection. For pressure sensing, a high sensitivity of 15.75 mV/kPa and 52.09 mV/kPa can be acquired within the pressure range of 4.9–25 kPa and 25–45 kPa, separately. In addition, it presents a temperature resolution of 0.381% per centigrade with a wide detection range of 25 °C to 100 °C. The electronic skin textile can perform multiple functions of ambient temperature detection, expiratory air temperature monitoring, external pressure perception, human pulse capture, and tactile spatial mapping with excellent sensing capacities. This study provides a new conceptual design for the next-generation wearable electronic skin.