Development of Flexible and Biodegradable Paper-Based Wheatstone Bridge Strain Gauge for Low-Cost Sensing Applications

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Abstract
In this letter, a paper-based flexible strain gauge has been proposed using standard office paper and everyday graphite pencil. Detailed analysis and characterization of several design parameters and sensor configurations have been investigated experimentally, such as the width and length of the electrodes and pencil graphite content. In addition, sensor topologies, such as the Wheatstone bridge configuration, have been investigated to achieve a highly sensitive strain gauge device. A full Wheatstone bridge configuration has been chosen based on the optimized design parameters. The fabricated structure demonstrated promising results with great sensitivity, high stability, and a wide uniform range from maximum tension to maximum compression. The proposed full Wheatstone device allows environmental compensation and exhibits a very high gauge factor of 40.2 for tensile strain and 34.4 for compressive strain for a deflection range of −30 to 30 mm. The proposed full, pencil-drawn Wheatstone bridge configuration is cost-effective and easy to fabricate with high sensitivity at 130 mV/V, spanning the entire range of the device. This enables compatibility with standard electronic readout platforms, including microcontrollers, for biomedical sensing, machine–human interfaces, and strain-sensing applications.

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