A method for performances of soft PDMS capacitive sensors fair comparison
Emile Martincic, Sylvie Bilent, Thi-Hong-Nhung Dinh, and Pierre-Yves Joubert
Because of their conformability, stretchability and possibility to be integrated into clothing, flexible pressure sensors have attracted a strong attention in the last decade. Many sensors have been described in the literature featuring a broad range of sensitivity and pressure range, especially PDMS dielectric based capacitive sensors which cope a significant proportion of the literature. With many different designs, all authors describe the sensitivity and measurement range of the sensor in order to emphasis on novel features but no standard properties reporting has been universally accepted leading difficult the comparison of the sensors.
To allow a fair comparison of the sensors, our team developed a behavioral model and automatically applied the model to the response curves from the literature. A couple of parameters (sensitivity/measurement range) could then be extracted from the experimental curves with no manual operation that could introduce a bias. The automatic extraction of the parameters allows to build a sensitivity/measurement range figure that highlights the relationhip between the properties of the sensors and their design and lower the human processing bias. The standard comparison method allows to clarify the dielectric structure effect on the ensitivity and measurement range and leads to define robust design rules.