IIIT Hyderabad, KAUST researchers develop low-cost flexible sensors for wearables and robotics

Researchers at IIIT Hyderabad and KAUST have developed low-cost, flexible capacitive pressure sensors using PDMS foam and cotton textiles. These scalable sensors, published in IEEE, are highly sensitive and ideal for use in wearables, robotics, and healthcare applications

Hyderabad: A team of researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH), and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has developed a new class of large-area, flexible dielectric materials that can be used as capacitive pressure sensors which are low-cost, highly sensitive, and suitable for applications in healthcare, robotics, and wearable devices.

Published in the IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics, the study demonstrates how bubble-induced PDMS foam combined with conductive textile electrodes can be engineered into reliable and scalable pressure sensors. The sensors show high repeatability, making them especially promising for human–machine interaction, surgical robotics, and tactile wearables.

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“Our fabrication approach uses everyday materials like cotton textiles and polymer foam, and still delivers performance comparable to state-of-the-art flexible sensors,” said Dr Aftab M Hussain, Associate Professor at IIIT Hyderabad.

The research team also synthesised polypyrrole-coated conductive cotton textile to use as electrodes using a simple chemical oxidative process and integrated them with bubble-trapped polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to create a compressible capacitive structure.