Optimal Design and Experiments of a Wearable Silicone Strain Sensor

Motion capture of human body potentially holds great significance for exoskeleton robots, human-computer interaction, sports and rehabilitation research. Dielectric Elastomer Sensors (DESs) are excellent candidates for wearable human motion capture system because of their intrinsic characteristics of softness, lightweight and compliance. Fabrication process of the DES was developed, but a very few of optimal design is mentioned. To get greater measurement precision, in this paper, some optimization criteria was put forward and validated by some experiments. As a practical example, the sensor was mounted on the wrist to measure joint rotation. The experiment results indicated that there is a roughly linear relationship between the output voltage and the joint angle. Therefore, the DES can be applied to motion capture of human body.

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