Title：Flexible IonTronic Sensing (FITS): Enabling Tactile Intelligence for Internet of Everything
Time：13:30 to 14:30, Jul.23, 2019
Place：F103, School of Mechanical Engineering
Host：GU Guoying, Professor (Institute of Robotics)

Biography
Prof. Tingrui Pan is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis. Leading the Micro-Nano Innovations (MiNI) Group, his research interests span a wide range of topics in bioengineering, including flexible sensing/wearable technologies, microfluidics/lab-on-a-chip, biomanufacturing/nanofabrication, mobile and personalized medicine. Prof. Pan has been known for inventing a new category of mechanical sensors, known as Flexible IonTronic Sensors (FITS), with the highest reported pressure-to-capacitance sensitivity and the largest signal-to-noise ratio, utilizing an elastic electronic double layer interface, both highly essential to dynamic wearable environments. The medical applications have been extended to non-invasive hemodynamic monitoring, body gesture and motion tracking, as well as pressure feedbacks on medical instruments. Prof. Pan has authored over 100 refereed publications, received more than $20 million federal and private research funding, and held more than 20 US patents/patent applications. His translational activities leads to formation of five high-tech startup companies and more than 10 of his co-inventions have been successfully licensed. Prof. Pan is the founding Director of UC Davis Global Research and Education in Advanced Technologies (GREAT) Program, a university flagship outreach program, which recruits and trains elite undergraduate students from all over the world in cutting-edge technology fields at UC Davis. He is an elected Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

Abstract

Internet of Things (IOTs) have become an extremely popular subject to explore in both industries and academia recently, in which a variety of machine vision and voice recognition technologies have been established to enable such human-machine interfaces. As the next phase of artificial intelligence, tactile intelligence by introducing to IOTs offers a completely new means to facilitate in the human-IOTs communications, where high-sensitivity, noise proof sensing mechanisms with long-term functionalities play critical roles in a real-world implementation, while the existing mechanical sensing technologies (i.e., resistive, capacitive, or piezoelectric) have yet offered a satisfactory solution to address them all. Here, we successfully introduced a flexible supercapacitive sensing modality to all-fabric materials for wearable pressure and force sensing using an elastic ionic-electronic interface. Notably, an electrospun ionic fabric utilizing nanofibrous structures offers an extraordinarily high pressure-to-capacitance sensitivity (114 nF∙kPa-1), which is at least 1,000 times higher than any existing capacitive sensors and one order of magnitude higher than the previously reported ionic devices, with a pressure resolution of 2.4 Pa, achieving high levels of noise immunity and signal stability for wearable applications. In addition, its fabrication process is fully compatible with existing industrial manufacturing and can lead to cost-effective production for its utility in emerging wearable uses in a foreseeable future.