Ultraflexible, large-area, physiological temperature sensors for multipoint measurements

We report a fabrication method for flexible and printable thermal sensors based on composites of semicrystalline acrylate polymers and graphite with a high sensitivity of 20 mK and a high-speed response time of less than 100 ms. These devices exhibit large resistance changes near body temperature un...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 112; no. 47; pp. 14533 - 14538
Main Authors Yokota, Tomoyuki, Inoue, Yusuke, Terakawa, Yuki, Reeder, Jonathan, Kaltenbrunner, Martin, Ware, Taylor, Yang, Kejia, Mabuchi, Kunihiko, Murakawa, Tomohiro, Sekino, Masaki, Voit, Walter, Sekitani, Tsuyoshi, Someya, Takao
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 24.11.2015
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Air
Air temperature
Animals
Body Temperature
Fabrication
Graphite - chemistry
Measurement
Physical Sciences
Physiology
Polymers
Polymers - chemistry
Rats
Sensors
Temperature
Temperature gradients
X-Ray Diffraction
biomedical devices
flexible electronics
organic electronics
temperature sensor
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Summary:We report a fabrication method for flexible and printable thermal sensors based on composites of semicrystalline acrylate polymers and graphite with a high sensitivity of 20 mK and a high-speed response time of less than 100 ms. These devices exhibit large resistance changes near body temperature under physiological conditions with high repeatability (1,800 times). Device performance is largely unaffected by bending to radii below 700 μm, which allows for conformal application to the surface of living tissue. The sensing temperature can be tuned between 25 °C and 50 °C, which covers all relevant physiological temperatures. Furthermore, we demonstrate flexible active-matrix thermal sensors which can resolve spatial temperature gradients over a large area. With this flexible ultrasensitive temperature sensor we succeeded in the in vivo measurement of cyclic temperatures changes of 0.1 °C in a rat lung during breathing, without interference from constant tissue motion. This result conclusively shows that the lung of a warm-blooded animal maintains surprising temperature stability despite the large difference between core temperature and inhaled air temperature.
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Author contributions: T.Y., Y.I., Y.T., J.R., K.M., T.M., M.S., W.V., T. Sekitani, and T. Someya designed research; T.Y., Y.I., Y.T., J.R., M.K., T.W., and K.Y. performed research; T.Y. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; T.Y., Y.I., Y.T., J.R., T.W., and K.Y. analyzed data; and T.Y., Y.I., J.R., M.K., and T. Someya wrote the paper.
1T.Y. and Y.I. contributed equally to this work.
Edited by John A. Rogers, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, and approved September 28, 2015 (received for review August 7, 2015)
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1515650112