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IMB-CNM talks: Tactile intelligence enabled by Flexible Iontronic Sensing (FITS) - Prof. Tingrui Pan

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23 Apr 2019
11:30h
Sala de Actos Pepe Millán, IMB-CNM, Campus UAB.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an extremely popular subject to explore in both industries and academia recently, in which a variety of machine vision and voice recognition technologies have been established to enable such human-machine interfaces. As the next phase of artificial intelligence, tactile intelligence by offering a completely new means to facilitate in the human-everything communications, where high-sensitivity, noise proof sensing mechanisms with long-term functionalities play critical roles in a real-world implementation, while the existing mechanical sensing technologies (i.e., resistive, capacitive, or piezoelectric) have yet offered a satisfactory solution to address them all.
Here, we successfully introduced various flexible supercapacitive sensing modalities to both natural and artificial materials for wearable pressure and force sensing using an elastic ionic-electronic interface. Notably, an electrospun ionic fabric utilizing nanofibrous structures offers an extraordinarily high pressure-to-capacitance sensitivity (114 nF∙kPa-1), which is at least 1,000 times higher than any existing capacitive sensors and one order of magnitude higher than the previously reported ionic devices, with a pressure resolution of 2.4 Pa, achieving high levels of noise immunity and signal stability for wearable applications. In addition, its fabrication process is fully compatible with existing industrial manufacturing and can lead to cost-effective production for its utility in emerging wearable uses in a foreseeable future.