Flexible silicone “honeycomb” sensing module inspired by the natural irregular holes of Taihu Lake Stone, used for athlete posture monitoring and human-computer interaction

Flexible silicone materials have excellent elastic properties and can maintain excellent structural stability under high-intensity repeated deformation. They are ideal materials for preparing piezoresistive flexible sensors. However, traditional silicone materials exhibit strong insulation properties. The solid block structure is also not conducive to improving sensitivity. Inspired by the irregular hole structure of Taihu Lake stone, this paper prepared a porous silica gel skeleton (rGO/CTAB/SG) based on reduced graphene oxide film coating, which was equipped with flexible interdigital electrodes to achieve electrical signal derivation. The “honeycomb” shaped sensing module prepared in this way achieves an extremely wide elastic deformation range (20-200%). In the pressure feedback layer, the rGO film is evenly coated on the SG surface, which greatly improves the device conductivity and sensing performance (high sensitivities of 89.4 kPa^− 1 and 25.4 kPa^− 1 are achieved within 0-30.2 kPa and 30.2–42 kPa, ultra-high durability under more than 22,000 load-unload cycles.) Numerical simulation analysis results confirmed that the structure of the flexible substrate SG prepared by this method maintained well when extreme deformation occurred, and no fracture or stress concentration occurred. As an elastic sensor, after being integrated with a microprocessor, it can easily monitor and analyze human body movement in real time. It has huge potential in areas such as daily training and health monitoring of athletes.