Transparent Flexible Active Faraday Cage Enables In Vivo Capacitance Measurement in Assembled Microsensor

Capacitive microsensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and pressure sensors are increasingly used in the modern electronic world. However, the in vivo use of capacitive sensing for measurement of pressure or other variables inside a human body suffers from significant errors due to stray capacitance. This article proposes a solution consisting of a transparent thin flexible Faraday cage that surrounds the sensor. By supplying the active sensing voltage simultaneously to the deformable electrode of the capacitive sensor and to the Faraday cage, the stray capacitance during in vivo measurements can be largely eliminated. Due to the transparency of the Faraday cage, the top and bottom portions of a capacitive sensor can be accurately aligned and assembled together. Experimental results presented in this article show that stray capacitance is reduced by a factor of 10 by the Faraday cage when the sensor is subjected to full immersion in water.