Machine Learning‑Enhanced Flexible Mechanical Sensing

To realize a hyperconnected smart society with high productivity,advances in flexible sensing technology are highly needed.Nowadays,flexible sensing technology has witnessed improvements in both the hardware performances of sensor devices and the data processing capabilities of the device’s software.Significant research efforts have been devoted to improving materials,sensing mechanism,and configurations of flexible sensing systems in a quest to fulfill the requirements of future technology.Meanwhile,advanced data analysis methods are being developed to extract useful information from increasingly complicated data collected by a single sensor or network of sensors.Machine learning(ML)as an important branch of artificial intelligence can efficiently handle such complex data,which can be multi-dimensional and multi-faceted,thus providing a powerful tool for easy interpretation of sensing data.In this review,the fundamental working mechanisms and common types of flexible mechanical sensors are firstly presented.Then how ML-assisted data interpretation improves the applications of flexible mechanical sensors and other closely-related sensors in various areas is elaborated,which includes health monitoring,human-machine interfaces,object/surface recognition,pressure prediction,and human posture/motion identification.Finally,the advantages,challenges,and future perspectives associated with the fusion of flexible mechanical sensing technology and ML algorithms are discussed.These will give significant insights to enable the advancement of next-generation artificial flexible mechanical sensing.

Flexible Waterproof Piezoresistive Pressure Sensors with Wide Linear Working Range Based on Conductive Fabrics

Developing flexible sensors with high working performance holds intense interest for diverse applications in leveraging the Internet-of-things(IoT)infrastructures.For flexible piezoresistive sensors,traditionally most efforts are focused on tailoring the sensing materials to enhance the contact resistance variation for improving the sensitivity and working range,and it,however,remains challenging to simultaneously achieve flexible sensor with a linear working range over a high-pressure region(>100 kPa)and keep a reliable sensitivity.Herein,we devised a laserengraved silver-coated fabric as"soft"sensor electrode material to markedly advance the flexible sensor's linear working range to a level of 800 kPa with a high sensitivity of 6.4 kPa^-1 yet a fast response time of only 4 ms as well as long-time durability,which was rarely reported before.The integrated sensor successfully routed the wireless signal of pulse rate to the portable smartphone,further demonstrating its potential as a reliable electronic.Along with the rationally building the electrode instead of merely focusing on sensing materials capable of significantly improving the sensor's performance,we expect that this design concept and sensor system could potentially pave the way for developing more advanced wearable electronics in the future.