Using Transparent Adhesive Tape as New Substrate for Integrated Flexible Enzymatic Sensor: Good Adhesion and Better Printability

Substrate plays an essential role in the construction of flexible electrode and related wearable sensors. Compared with conventional flexible substrates such as Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the common transparent adhesive tape exhibits the unique advantages in the non-adhesive surface with good printability, allowing the conductive layer to be deposited directly on its surface, and in another adhesive surface with good fastening, thus facilitating the fabrication of as-prepared electrode in subsequent wearable sensors. Herein, we constructed a new type of flexible sensor to detect ascorbic acid which is closely related to human health in sweat by integrating flexible electrode based on transparent adhesive tape with potentiostat that incorporate the critical signal conditioning, processing, and transmission functions. Experiment results show that resulting electrode still has the good electrochemistry performance even after 1000 bending cycles (20 % bending degrees). By connecting as-prepared flexible electrode to the potentiostat to carry out real time analysis, the resulting sensor exhibits excellent sensitivity, detection limit and repeatability (0.15 V detection potential vs printed Ag/AgCl reference electrode, 3.8 μM detection limit, 25 μM-1 mM linearity, and good selectivity).