Transparent, Flexible Nanoporous Sensors with Humidity and Pressure Sensing Capabilities for Sports Health Status Monitoring

Exercise can strengthen the body, but due to the difference in exercise volume, which makes people’s cardiorespiratory adaptive capacity different, unreasonable exercise load intensity is very easy to induce cardiovascular accidents. In this paper, an electronic skin sensor for monitoring human exercise status is proposed, which is a dual sensor for detecting changes in humidity and pressure by composites of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA), citric acid (CA), and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The nanoporous sensor consisting of a PVA-CA-AgNP composite is flexible, lightweight, sensitive, and cost-effective. The sensor responds to unit humidity changes with a sensitivity as high as 0.34% RH –1 when the relative humidity is increased from 11 to 98%, and the pressure sensing/recovery time is 200/600 ms, respectively, when compressed by an external force. The sensor can be used not only for monitoring human movement and breathing patterns but also for further applications in information encryption. The sensor’s continuous detection of human joint movements and breathing rhythms proves its effectiveness in health monitoring and confirms its stability and reliability in human movement and health applications.