Influence of ambient temperature and humidity on the performance of a screen-printed stretchable strain sensing array

Stretchable strain sensors are an essential for emerging soft electronics, due to their mechanical flexibility and adaptability, which enables monitoring of human motion, health, and robotic movement. Recent studies have demonstrated impressive improvements in resistance response and stretchability. However, their performance under varying environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity remain highly underexplored. Here, we investigated how variations in ambient temperature and humidity affect the performance of a custom designed stretchable strain sensing array (SS-Flower15), and benchmark it against a commercial strain gauge (SG). An in-house humidity chamber was built, and environmental conditions were systematically varied. Our results revealed that SS-Flower15 exhibited a larger resistance response than the commercial SG under same external applied loading conditions; however, the comparison is qualitative because of possible differences in local strain transfer. While the sensor’s resistance was sensitive to moisture-induced changes, it still maintained linear strain-response characteristics. This study highlights the need for careful calibration and compensation strategies for applications such as wearable devices, field-deployed robotics, and aerospace technologies, where varying environmental conditions are common and cannot be tightly controlled.