Spider-Inspired Ultra-Sensitive Flexible Vibration Sensor for Multifunctional Sensing.

Flexible vibration sensor can not only capture broad classes of physiologically relevant information, including mechano-vibration signatures of body processes and precision kinematics of core-body motions, but also detect environmental seismic wave, providing early warning to wearer in time. Spider is one of the most vibration-sensitive creatures due to its hair-like sensilla and lyriform slit structure. Here a spider-inspired highly sensitive flexible vibration sensor is designed and fabricated for multifunctional sensing. The vibration sensitivity of the flexible sensor is increased over two orders of magnitude from 0.006 to 0.5 mV/g and the strain sensitivity is hugely enhanced from 0.08 to 150 compared to a plain sensor counterpart. It is shown that the synergistic effect of cilium arrays and cracks is the key for achieving the greatly enhanced vibration and strain sensitivity. The dynamic sensitivity of 0.5 mV/g outperforms the corresponding commercial sensors. The flexible sensor is demonstrated to be generally feasible for detecting vibration signals caused by walk, tumble and explosion as well as capturing human body motions, indicating its great potential for applications in human health monitoring devices, posture control of robotics and early earthquake warning, etc.