In-vivo blood pressure sensing with bi-filler nanocomposite

Conductive elastomers present desirable qualities for sensing pressure in-vivo, such as high piezoresistance in tiny volumes, conformability and, biocompatibility. Many electrically conductive nanocomposites however, are susceptible to electrical drift following repeated stress cycles and chemical aging. Here we propose an innovative approach to stabilize nanocomposite percolation network against incomplete recovery to improve reproducibility and facilitate sensor calibration. We decouple the tunnelling-percolation network of highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) nanoparticles from the incomplete viscoelastic recovery of the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix by inserting minute amounts of insulating SiO₂ nanospheres. SiO₂ nanospheres effectively reduce the number of nearest neighbours at each percolation node switching off the parallel electrical pathways that might become activated under incomplete viscoelastic relaxation. We varied the size of SiO₂ nanospheres and their filling fraction to demonstrate nearly complete piezoresistance recovery when SiO₂ and HOPG nanoparticles have equal diameters (≈400 nm) and SiO₂ and HOPG volume fractions are 1 % and 29.5 % respectively. We demonstrate an in-vivo blood pressure sensor based on this bi-filler composite.