Abstract:Recently, hydrogel has shown great application prospects in the field of flexible wearable sensor, but the simultaneous realization of remarkable tensile, anti-freezing and adhesion features via a facile method remains challenging. In this work, based on intermolecular physical interactions, poly(N-hydroxyethyl acrylamide) (PHEAA) and gelatin (GE) gel were employed to prepare PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel by adding sodium chloride (NaCl) and ethylene glycol (EG) into the gel precursor solution via a facile “one-pot” method. The universal tensile machine (UTA), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), rotational rheometer (DHR) and electrochemical workstation were used to characterize the structure and properties of hydrogels. The results show the tensile strain of PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel is 1567%. Due to the presence of NaCl and ethylene glycol, the PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel possesses outstanding anti-freezing capability, it can maintain excellent stretchability (558%) and conductivity (0.21S/m) at -30°C. Meanwhile, PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel exhibits excellent adhesion property to different substrates such as glass, metal, paper, and polytetrafluoroethylene. More importantly, PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel-based strain sensor has excellent strain sensitivity and cyclic stability for both large strain and small strain, and it is capable of stably detecting and monitoring both large-scale human motions and subtle physiological signals in a wide temperature range (-30°C to 25°C). Therefore, PHEAA-GE-EG-NaCl hydrogel hydrogel holds promising potentials as wearable sensor.