Wearable sensors for detection of human activities have encouraged the development of highly elastic sensors. In particular, to capture subtle and large-scale body motion, stretchable and wide-range strain sensors are highly desired, but still a challenge. Herein, a highly stretchable and transparent stain sensor based on ionic liquids and elastic polymer has been developed. The as-obtained sensor exhibits impressive stretchability with wide-range strain (from 0.1% to 400%), good bending properties and high sensitivity, whose gauge factor can reach 7.9. Importantly, the sensors show excellent biological compatibility and succeed in monitoring the diverse human activities ranging from the complex large-scale multidimensional motions to subtle signals, including wrist, finger and elbow joint bending, finger touch, breath, speech, swallow behavior and pulse wave.

With the booming development of flexible pressure sensors, the need for multifunctional and high-performance pressure sensor has become increasingly important. Although great progress has been made in the novel structure and sensing mechanism of the pressure sensor, the trade-off between the sensitivity and the wide-detection range has prevented its development, further restricting its application in wearable human–machine interfaces (WHMIs). Herein, a novel pressure sensor based on the hierarchical conductive fabric was fabricated and purposed as a WHMI. Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) nanowires (PEDOT NWs) and cellulose nanofibers (CNF) were stacked on a conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) fabric to form a special spatial multi-level hierarchical structure inside the fabric, which is a breakthrough for the improvement of the sensor's performance and makes the fabrication process of in situ polymerization suitable for large-scale production. The multi-level hierarchical structures endowed the pressure sensor with characteristics of high sensitivity (15.78 kPa⁻¹), a wide-detection range from 30 Pa to 700 kPa, and outstanding stability toward compression and bending deformation. Benefiting from its excellent performance, a human–machine interface based on arrayed pressure sensors and signal processing system can control the illumination of the LED array and effectively capture finger motion to control the eight-direction movement of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This improved performance of the pressure sensor based on the hierarchical conductive fabric made it a widespread application in intelligent fabric, electronic skin, human–machine interfaces, and robotics.