Recent Development of Flexible Tactile Sensors and Their Applications

Abstract

With the rapid development of society in recent decades, the wearable sensor has attracted attention for motion-based health care and artificial applications. However, there are still many limitations to applying them in real life, particularly the inconvenience that comes from their large size and non-flexible systems. To solve these problems, flexible small-sized sensors that use body motion as a stimulus are studied to directly collect more accurate and diverse signals. In particular, tactile sensors are applied directly on the skin and provide input signals of motion change for the flexible reading device. This review provides information about different types of tactile sensors and their working mechanisms that are piezoresistive, piezocapacitive, piezoelectric, and triboelectric. More-over, this review presents not only the applications of the tactile sensor in motion sensing and health care monitoring, but also their contributions in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years. Other applications, such as human behavior studies, are also suggested. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.