Potentially applied in low-noise applications such as structural health monitoring (SHM), a 1-axis piezoelectric MEMS accelerometer based on aerosol deposition is designed, fabricated, simulated, and measured in this study. It is a cantilever beam structure with a tip proof mass and PZT sensing layer. To figure out whether the design is suitable for SHM, working bandwidth and noise level are obtained via simulation. For the first time, we use aerosol deposition method to deposit thick PZT film during the fabrication process to achieve high sensitivity. In performance measurement, we obtain the charge sensitivity, natural frequency, working bandwidth and noise equivalent acceleration of 22.74 pC/g, 867.4 Hz, 10–200 Hz (within ±5% deviation) and 5.6 $$\mu {{{\rm{g}}}}/\sqrt{{{{\rm{Hz}}}}}$$μ g / Hz (at 20 Hz). To demonstrate its feasibility for real applications, vibrations of a fan are measured by our designed sensor and a commercial piezoelectric accelerometer, and the results match well with each other. Moreover, shaker vibration measurement with ADXL1001 indicates that the fabricated sensor has a much lower noise level. In the end, we show that our designed accelerometer has good performance compared to piezoelectric MEMS accelerometers in relevant studies and great potential for low-noise applications compared to low-noise capacitive MEMS accelerometers.

This paper presents the development of tactile sensors using the sol-gel process to deposit a PZT thin-film from 250 nm to 1 μm on a flexible stainless steel substrate. The PZT thin-film tactile sensor can be used to measure human pulses from several areas, including carotid, brachial, finger, ankle, radial artery, and the apical region. Flexible PZT tactile sensors can overcome the diverse topology of various human regions and sense the corresponding signals from human bodies. The measured arterial pulse waveform can be used to diagnose hypertension and cardiac failure in patients. The proposed sensors have several advantages, such as flexibility, reliability, high strain, low cost, simple fabrication, and low temperature processing. The PZT thin-film deposition process includes a pyrolysis process at 150 °C/500 °C for 10/5 min, followed by an annealing process at 650 °C for 10 min. Finally, the consistent pulse wave velocity (PWV) was demonstrated based on human pulse measurements from apical to radial, brachial to radial, and radial to ankle. It is characterized that the sensitivity of our PZT-based tactile sensor was approximately 0.798 mV/g.