writer：Ali, I.; Chen, L.; Huang, Y.*; Song, L.; Lu, X.; Liu, B.; Zhang, L.; Zhang, J.; Hou, L.; Chen, T*
keywords：Gold Aerogel
source：期刊
specific source：Langmuir
Issue time：2018年

Humidity sensor has received considerable attention in recent years because of its significance and wide applications in agriculture, industries, goods stores and medical fields. However, the conventional humidity sensors usually possessed the complexed sensing mechanism, low sensitivity, and required a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. The exploring an ideal sensing material to amplify the sensitivity of humidity sensor is still a big challenge. Herein, we developed a simple, low-cost and scalable fabrication strategy to construct a highly sensitive humidity sensor based on polymer/gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) hybrid materials. The hybrid polymer/AuNPs aerogel was prepared by a simple freeze-drying method. By taking the advantage of conductivity of AuNPs and high surface area of highly porous structure, the hybrid poly-N-isopropylacrylamide (PNIPAm)/AuNPs aerogel showed high sensitivity to water molecules. Interestingly, the hybrid PNIPAm/AuNPs aerogel based humidity sensor can be used to detect human breath in different states such as normal breath, fast breath and deep breath, or by different individuals such as person in illness, smoking and normal, which is promising in practical flexible wearable devices for human health monitoring. In addition, the humidity sensor can be used in whistle tune recognition.