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Electronic skin imitates the function of human skin. The flexible pressure sensor is an important sensor of electronic skin. Although the flexible pressure sensor has made some progress, electronic skin is still a challenging subject with good pressure resolution, high sensitivity, and fast response ability in biomedical, human motion detection, personal health monitoring, and other fields. The PEDOT:PSS/GR/SWCNTs multicomponent solution was directly written on the flexible PDMS substrate by the near-field electrohydrodynamic direct-writing method, a serpentine shaped pressure sensitive unit was prepared, which was encapsulated with the PDMS thin film, and the flexible pressure sensor was fabricated. The sensitivity of the flexible pressure sensor is about 0.39 kPa−1 at 0–0.5 kPa and 1.04 kPa−1 at 0.5–2.4 kPa, and the response/recovery speed is 75 ms/150 ms, respectively. The fabricated flexible pressure sensor can detect a small pressure of about 6.4 Pa. The experimental results show that the fabricated flexible pressure sensor has high sensitivity, fast response capability, and low detection limit. The flexible pressure sensor for electronic skin demonstrates good performance in the application of finger joint movement and word pronunciation recognition, which indicates that it has great potential application in human motion detection and personal health monitoring. Image 1 • Flexible pressure sensitive unit fabricated by using near-field electrohydrodynamic direct-writing method. • Patterns of flexible pressure sensitive unit were fabricated into a serpentine shape to improve the performance. • The fabricated flexible pressure sensor has high sensitivity, fast response capability, and low detection limit. • The fabricated sensor has good performance in the application of finger joint motion and speech recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an essential role in electronic skins, flexible pressure sensors have attracted wide attention for their applications in human-machine interaction and intelligent prosthetic, etc. Whereas, in general, it is difficult for most flexible pressure sensors to acquire high accuracy, especially under multi-modal interference (temperature, humidity and deformation). Herein, a novel stretchable flexible pressure sensor was presented by direct writing, which was capable of weakening the strain effect, fending off humidity interference and restraining thermal influence by using a double layer raised island structure substrate, a covering layer and a Wheatstone bridge-configuration of the sensing element. The sensor kept robust under multi-modal interference of strain about 0–20%, temperature of 30–80 °C and humidity in 20–90%, owning high and stable sensitivity of 2.6 kPa−1–14.05 kPa−1 under 0–74 kPa. Two demonstrations of grabbing a bottle with different temperatures and a kid's catching behavior on a opisthenar of a carer verified that such sensor possessed a great potential in many non-structured applications and will be a promising candidate for stretchable flexible pressure sensors in future. Image 1 • A robust pressure sensor which can restrain the interference of deformation, temperature and humidity was presented. • A double layer raised island structure substrate was used to weaken the strain effect. • A Wheatstone bridge configuration of four same sensing elements was elaborated to eliminate the thermal impact. • Two applications including grabbing a bottle and a kid's catching behavior have been demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]