Strong bond accelerates force-sensitive soft sensors

Stretchy and squeezy soft sensors that can fit around body parts or squeezed in hands have been in development for some time, but they haven’t made it to market because of difficulties found in integrating the wires, computer chips and batteries needed to gather, process and send the data collected by the sensor.

Now, a team of researchers from Imperial College London have invented a way to bond the stretchy and squeezy force-sensitive soft materials to electrical components. They are said to have developed a bond so strong that the rubber itself breaks before the bond between the two different materials does. Their results are published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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In a statement, first author Michael Kasimatis, from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial, said: "We hope this method will allow us to make low-cost soft sensors that are reliable and portable, that can be used to monitor people's health in their own homes.