THESIS
2016
Abstract
Biology is soft and elastic. However, conventional electronics, such as smartwatches and smartphones are built on rigid silicon wafers. The fundamental mismatch in mechanics, electrics, material or even electromagnetics presents tremendous challenges to change the fundamental conception of the wearable world, from hard, rigid, planar chips to soft, stretchable, curvilinear sheets.
In this thesis, we explore the use of soft conductive rubber as a building block for pressure sensors. In particular, we developed a sensitive resistive pressure
sensor, and then in combination with a stretchable dipole antenna, created the first antenna-based pressure sensor.
We performed finite element modelling to understand how the shapes of the microstructured conductive rubber impact mechanical, elect...[
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Biology is soft and elastic. However, conventional electronics, such as smartwatches and smartphones are built on rigid silicon wafers. The fundamental mismatch in mechanics, electrics, material or even electromagnetics presents tremendous challenges to change the fundamental conception of the wearable world, from hard, rigid, planar chips to soft, stretchable, curvilinear sheets.
In this thesis, we explore the use of soft conductive rubber as a building block for pressure sensors. In particular, we developed a sensitive resistive pressure
sensor, and then in combination with a stretchable dipole antenna, created the first antenna-based pressure sensor.
We performed finite element modelling to understand how the shapes of the microstructured conductive rubber impact mechanical, electrical sensitivity, and describe the use of nanofabrication techniques and the use of printing techniques as a scalable means of manufacturing such sensors. We further develop such a resistive pressure sensor that can be used to monitor the human pulse when placed on the radial artery near the wrist. To enable stretchable property, we developed an Ag-PDMS conductive elastomer, achieving greater than 2000 S/cm and stretchable up to 200% strain. In addition, we demonstrate the first successful stretchable dipole antenna and transmission line using conductive
elastomer. Lastly, we propose using the antenna-based sensing mechanism to build a pressure sensor that responds to the pressure in the form of an RF signal. We call the novel sensor device Antenna-Based Pressure Sensing Sensor (ABPSS). The ABPSS prototype sensor encodes the pressure information using amplitude encoding, making it a promising active/passive sensor device for pervasive healthcare sensing applications.
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