A Kirigami-Inspired Stretchable Pressure Sensor for Conformal and Decoupled Human–Machine Touch Mapping

Tactile sensors play a key role in human-machine interaction (HMI), providing essential tactile measurement capabilities for this field, where their performance directly determines the operational safety and haptic quality of HMI machines. When tactile sensors are applied to human or machine surfaces, their ability to fit comfortably and conform to the curves of the body is a significant challenge to address. Existing stretchable and flexible sensors show excellent adaptive conformability and accuracy. Yet, their fabrication methods usually rely on expensive and specialised equipment and are not accessible to many researchers from the interdisciplinary field of human-computer interaction to implement, customize and deploy. To address this problem, this paper proposes a stretchable pressure sensor of low-cost and fabrication complexity, drawing inspiration from the ancient paper-cutting art of Kirigami. The developed prototype is experimentally tested for its ability to conform to the human body, while being characterized by a high force-detection accuracy, with an average error of 4% in the range of 0 – 1000 g per cell), and the sampling electronics of it has demonstrated effective crosstalk elimination function. The proposed approach also serves as a methodology for rapid fabrication of flexible electronic devices, enabling high-precision continuous force monitoring across both preloaded (e.g., sitting/lying postures) and non-preloaded scenarios (e.g. contact detection).