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Stretchable on-skin touchless screen sensor enabled by ionic hydrogel

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Abstract

Screen sensors are the most commonly used human-machine interfaces in our everyday life, which have been extensively applied in personal electronics like cellphones. Touchless screen sensors are attracting growing interest due to their distinct advantages of high interaction freedom, comfortability, and hand hygiene. However, the material compositions of current touchless screen sensors are rigid and fragile, hardly meeting the needs of wearable and stretchable on-skin electronics development. Additionally, these touchless screen sensors are also restricted by high power consumption, limited gesture types of recognition, and the requirement of light conditions. Here, we report a stretchable on-skin touchless screen sensor (OTSS) enabled by an ionic hydrogel-based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). Compared with current touchless screen sensors, the OTSS is stretchable, self-powered, and competent to recognize diverse gestures by making use of charges naturally carried on fingers without the need of sufficient light conditions. An on-skin noncontact screen operating system is further demonstrated on the basis of the OTSS, which could unlock a cellphone interface in touchless operation mode on the human skin. This work for the first time introduces the on-skin touchless concept to screen sensors and offers a direction to develop new-generation screen sensors for future cellphones and personal electronics.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 62074137 and 52303112), the Foundation for Outstanding Young Teachers in Universities of Henan Province (No. 2021GGJS014), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2022TQ0281 and 2023M733213).

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  1. Tianxing Feng, Dan Ling, and Chaoyue Li contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Materials Physics of Ministry of Education, School of Physics and Microelectronics, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

    Tianxing Feng, Dan Ling, Chaoyue Li, Wentao Zheng, Shichuan Zhang, Chang Li, Lijun Lu & Yanchao Mao

  2. A.E. Favorsky Irkutsk Institute of Chemistry, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk, 664033, Russian Federation

    Artem Emel’yanov & Alexander S. Pozdnyakov

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  1. Tianxing Feng
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Correspondence to Lijun Lu or Yanchao Mao.

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Feng, T., Ling, D., Li, C. et al. Stretchable on-skin touchless screen sensor enabled by ionic hydrogel. Nano Res. 17, 4462–4470 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-6365-8

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