• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.423-427
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• 2022

A pressure sensor that mimics the sensing ability of human skin has emerged as high-profile technology because it shows remarkable applications in numerous fields such as robotics, human health monitoring, and artificial prosthetics. Whereas recent pressure sensors have achieved high sensitivity similar to that of human skin, they still show limited detection bandwidth. Moreover, once these e-skin are fabricated, their sensitivity and stiffness are fixed; therefore, they can be used for only limited applications. Our study proposes a new adaptive pressure sensor built with uniform gallium microdroplet-elastomer composite. Based on the phase transition of gallium microdroplets, the proposed sensor undergoes mode transformation, enabling it to have a higher sensitivity and wider detection bandwidth compared with those of human skin. In addition, we succeeded in extending a single adaptive pressure sensor to sensor arrays based on its high uniformity, reproducibility, and large-scale manufacturability. Finally, we designed an adaptive e-skin with the sensor array and demonstrated its applications on health monitoring tasks including blood pulse and body weight measurements.