Bioinspired and multiscale hierarchical design of a pressure sensor with high sensitivity and wide linearity range for high-throughput biodetection

Currently, this has been a great challenge working in the field of fabricating flexible pressure sensors with high sensitivity, wide linearity, and a simple manufacturing process for practical applications. Meanwhile, flexible piezoresistive sensors have caused considerable interest in the electronic skin and healthcare detection systems for sensing biophysical signals such as pulse waves, respiration, and intraocular pressure. Reading hidden health information by imitating the perceptual behavior of organisms has become a very active developed area of research. However, the lack of effective signal transduction is a notable important limitation of the study for sensors to detect biochemical signals, such as metabolites, proteins, which contain more reference value and health information. Therefore, we firstly prepared a multiscale hierarchical designed pressure sensor based on polyaniline urchin-like hollow spheres (PANI-UHSs) as conductive material mixed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) substrate, which exhibited a satisfactory sensitivity of 17.8 kPa(-1) in the pressure range of 0-160 kPa. In this work, a simple way to address the issue was proposed using the sensor combined with a gas-producing immunoassay reaction, resulting in a broad and sensitive determination of the target carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA). Furthermore, it would be also interesting to the design of array-based immunoassay device which conceptually validates the application potential of flexible sensors in high-throughput biomedical detection. It is expected that the introduction of this strategy will become a paradigm that inspires broader applications of flexible sensors for more comprehensive medical detection, molecular diagnostics, and faster portable biomedical analysis.

Automated summary

Currently, fabricating flexible pressure sensors with high sensitivity, wide linearity, and a simple manufacturing process is a major challenge. The use of flexible piezoresistive sensors in electronic skin and healthcare detection systems for sensing biophysical signals has gained considerable interest. However, there is a lack of effective signal transduction for sensors to detect biochemical signals, which contain more reference value and health information. This study proposes a multiscale hierarchical designed pressure sensor based on polyaniline urchin-like hollow spheres (PANI-UHSs) as a conductive material, mixed with a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) substrate, to address this limitation.