Electrical Engineering student Inyeol Yoon, from Professor Yoon Young Chung’s laboratory, collaborated with Chemical Engineering Professor Kilwon Cho’s team to develop a high-performance vibration sensor that attaches conveniently to skin and is much more sensitive than conventional microphones. The findings were published online in Nature Communications on June 18.
Skin-attached vibration sensors are attracting attention for applications requiring next-generation voice recognition, including human–machine interfaces, the Internet of Things, speech recognition, and vocal health monitoring. However, acoustic resonance and attenuation cause conventional sensors’ sensitivity to vary significantly with frequency, allowing measurement of voice patterns but making quantitative analysis difficult.
The researchers addressed this by improving material properties and sensor structure, creating a flexible sensor that maintains consistently high sensitivity across the entire voice-frequency range.
They confirmed accurate voice-signal measurement unaffected by external conditions such as intense noise and demonstrated applications in voice-based security and vocal health monitoring.
They expect skin-attached flexible-sensor voice recognition to serve as a next-generation enabling technology widely applicable to human–machine interfaces, IoT, speech recognition, and vocal health monitoring industries.
View the June 18 online article in Nature Communications.