High performance flexible and wearable strain sensor based on rGO and PANI modified Lycra cotton e-textile

Intelligent flexible strain sensors based on fabric have caused tremendous attention in the application of wearable devices because of their lightweight and excellent air permeability. It is still a great challenge to achieve excellent stability, high sensitivity, and wide working range. In this work, a high-performance strain sensor with reduced graphene oxide (rGO) reinforced polyaniline (PANI) based on polydopamine (PDA) modified Lycra cotton (LC) electronic textile (e-textile) was fabricated. The strain sensor of PANI/rGO/PDA/LC exhibits high sensitivity with a gauge factor (GF) of 24, a wide strain range of 0.2–50%, and excellent mechanical durability and stability for 1500 stretching/releasing cycles test. Such e-textile is promising to be integrated with other wearable devices to track human motion signals in real-time for human-machine and medical monitoring.