A Wearable Flexible Acceleration Sensor for Monitoring Human Motion

Skin-inspired flexible wearable acceleration sensors attract much attention due to their advantages of portability, personalized and comfortable experience, and potential application in healthcare monitoring, human–machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, and physical sports performance evaluation. This paper presents a flexible wearable acceleration sensor for monitoring human motion by introducing the island–bridge configuration and serpentine interconnects. Compared with traditional wearable accelerometers, the flexible accelerometer proposed in this paper improves the wearing comfort while reducing the cost of the device. Simulation and experiments under bending, stretching, and torsion conditions demonstrate that the flexible performance of the flexible acceleration sensor can meet the needs of monitoring the daily movement of the human body, and it can work normally under various conditions. The measurement accuracy of the flexible acceleration sensor is verified by comparing it with the data of the commercial acceleration sensor. The flexible acceleration sensor can measure the acceleration and the angular velocity of the human body with six degrees of freedom and recognize the gesture and motion features according to the acceleration characteristics. The presented flexible accelerometers provide great potential in recognizing the motion features that are critical for healthcare monitoring and physical sports performance evaluation.