Design and fabrication of paper-based stretchable sensor for respiration monitoring

Wearable electronics for health monitoring have recently been shown to provide significant benefits for early-stage disease identification. In this paper, we designed and fabricated a paper-based stretchable respiration sensor that utilizes graphite on paper (cellulose fiber) as a sensing material. A kirigami-structure design is proposed for graphite on the paper sensor using a simple laser cutting approach. Using such kirigami structures with stretchability of up to 20%, cracking issues in the paper-based sensor when stretched and attached to a curved surface such as philtrum can be eliminated. We successfully demonstrated the real-time monitoring of human respiration. The proposed sensor has the benefits of being stretchable, flexible, low-cost, non-invasive, and very sensitive, and it has a lot of potential for wearable healthcare technologies.