Origami-inspired strain sensors could help detect diseases

Researchers on the USC Viterbi School of Engineering looked to origami to create latest sensors that would someday be employed to detect deformations in organs and in addition to be used in wearables and soft robotics.

Their paper, “High-Stretchability and Low-Hysteresis Strain Sensors Using Origami-Inspired 3D Mesostructures,” featured in Science Advances explains how USC researchers Hangbo Zhao, Xinghao Huang, Liangshu Liu, Yung Hsin Lin, Rui Feng, Yiyang Shen, and Yuanning Chang developed “stretchable strain sensors,” that may measure how much an object strains or deforms.

The challenge is to create sensors that may stretch significantly, respond quickly, and provides precise readings even when measuring large and dynamic deformations.”

Hangbo Zhao, paper’s corresponding writer, USC Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering

Current stretchable strain sensors mostly use soft materials like rubber-;but this sort of material can have irreversible changes in the fabric properties through repeated use, thus producing unreliable metrics related to deformation detection.

Researchers thus devised a brand new sort of structure for the sensors. Inspired by origami, more rigid materials are folded with electrodes on either side of the panel (imagine the sensor as an the wrong way up, opened book with two electrodes on the back and front covers). Because the electrodes unfold the strength of the electrical field between the electrodes is captured. A model developed by the team then converts this reading right into a measurement that captures the amplitude of the deformation.

The newly created sensors can stretch as much as 3 times their original size with high sensing accuracy even with repeated use. As well as, the sensors respond in a short time, detecting deformations in lower than 22 milliseconds in very tiny areas (roughly 5 square millimeters). As well as, they’re able to detecting strain from different directions.

Such sensors can measure large and complicated deformations accurately, which might have applications in sensing motions of sentimental robots, tracking movements of human joints, and even monitoring organs comparable to the bladder to find out abnormalities that may indicate disease.