High-Performance Piezoresistive Electronic Skin with Bionic Hierarchical Microstructure and Microcracks

Electronic skin (E-skin), a popular research topic at present, has achieved significant progress in a variety of sophisticated applications. However, the poor sensitivity and stability severely limit the development of its application. Here, we present a facile, cost-effective, and scalable method for manufacturing E-skin devices with bionic hierarchical microstructure and microcracks. Our devices exhibit high sensitivity (10 kPa-1) and excellent durability (10 000 cycles). The synergistic enhancement mechanism of the hierarchical microstructure and the microcracks on the conductive layers was discovered. Moreover, we carried out a series of studies on the airflow detection and the noncontact speech recognition.