SingleTact - Miniature Force Sensors

09/10/2026

Avoid these mistakes before your first build!

Working with a SingleTact flexible force sensor for the first time? Here are three common mounting mistakes that could affect your measurements or damage your sensor.

Bending too close to the sensing head can damage the sensor.

Applying uneven pressure across the sensing area can affect accuracy and repeatability, and potentially deform the sensor.

Skipping moisture protection in humid environments can allow condensation to affect the electronics.

Small mounting details can make a big difference to your results.

🔗 Read our full mounting guide in comments

03/10/2026

A Prosthetic Hand Built for an 8-Year-Old

Most multi-articulated prosthetic hands are designed for adults, which leaves children with few options. Researchers at the University of California, Davis designed the BEAR PAW: a child-sized prosthetic hand for 8-year-olds with six actuated motions and eleven degrees of freedom, weighing 177 g and costing about 500 USD in components.

To find out how firmly it could actually hold things, the team built 3D-printed test objects with one or two calibrated 8 mm SingleTact sensors (10 N range) inside. These measured the grasping force across different grasp types and individual finger movements.

The result: grasp forces from 0.42 N to 7.2 N, a closing time of 0.67 seconds, and performance comparable to or better than four research-based adult prosthetic hands in standardised testing.
A small sensor hidden inside an everyday test object is a simple way to put real numbers on a design goal.

Great work by Marcus A. Battraw, Peyton R. Young, Wilsaan M. Joiner and Jonathon S. Schofield.

Read more: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2022.1000159/full

Although beginning to emerge, multiarticulate upper limb prostheses for children remain sparse despite the continued advancement of mechatronic technologies ...

28/09/2026

Tape or glue? Depends on your application.

Squeezing a sensor into a tight prototype is trickier than it looks. Tape is the easy, reversible choice for most builds. Just skip stiff packaging tape and use something like PTFE or PVC instead, so it doesn't add rigidity to the mount. Glue is for the spots tape can't reach, like narrow slots. Neither one wins outright. It depends on whether you'll ever need to take it apart again.

See both methods explained in the application tones (link in comments).

26/09/2026

How Much Force Reaches the Weak Layer?

When avalanche professionals run a compression test, they tap on an isolated column of snow and watch for a fracture in a weak layer below. A team from BOKU Exchange University in Vienna, the WSL-Institut für Schnee- und Lawinenforschung SLF, and the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate asked a simple question with serious consequences: how much of that tapping force actually reaches the weak layer?

To answer it, they built a measurement device that spreads the load across the full 30 cm × 30 cm test column, with a single SingleTact capacitive force sensor at its centre, calibrated to 450 N and sampled at 100 times per second.

The team ran 116 field tests at eight Alpine locations with 13 practitioners, plus tests with 62 more participants. The stress reaching the weak layer depended on both the snowpack and the person doing the test, and the scatter in the data was surprisingly small at the lower loading steps.

This is field science in cold, wet, unforgiving conditions, and it shows how a thin, robust sensor can turn a hand-tapped test into measured data.

Great work by Silke Griesser, Christine Pielmeier, Håvard Boutera Toft and Ingrid Reiweger.

Read more: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/stress-measurements-in-the-weak-layer-during-snow-stability-tests/26DBD00E7309A4EF1C50F9FED88186F7

Stress measurements in the weak layer during snow stability tests - Volume 65

21/09/2026

Bend it wrong, ruin the reading.

Trying to measure force on a 3D-printed gripper or a wearable prototype? Most sensors are either too rigid or too bulky to fit. Thin, flexible force sensors like SingleTact solve that, but mounting them right matters just as much. The sensor body needs a bend radius over 300mm, while the tail can flex down to 3mm. Get that backwards and you damage the exact area meant to give you clean data.

Full mounting guide linked below.

17/09/2026

Grip Force You Can Actually Control

A recent study from Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (Austria) introduced a topology-optimized, Fin-Ray-inspired robotic finger for parallel grippers, paired with a real-time PID force controller, and tested it head-to-head against the standard Fin-Ray design across three object shapes.

Our SingleTact ultra-thin capacitive force sensor played a key role in making that comparison possible. Mounted directly on the finger, SingleTact fed live force data into the control loop every 100 milliseconds, holding gripping force steady on target so both finger designs could be tested under genuinely matched conditions, not just similar ones.

The payoff: once force was no longer a variable, the optimized finger wrapped objects up to 28.7% better than the standard design.

It's a great example of the kind of validation work robotics students take on every day, using a compact, affordable sensor to actually test an engineering idea rather than just simulate it.

Great work by Gidugu Lakshmi Srinivas, Pataki Abel Endre, Hasanaj Dea, and Mathias Brandstötter at the ADMiRE Research Center.

Read more: https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/icm3-26/126027106

29/07/2026

From a Measured Pinch to a Virtual Illusion: SingleTact's Role in KAIST's CHI 2026 Haptics Study

KAIST's Graduate School of Culture Technology has developed finger tendon vibration (FTV), a technique that creates the illusion of finger movement in virtual reality, without any device physically moving the finger.

To make the illusion work, researchers Kun-Woo Song, Youngrae Kim, and Sang Ho Yoon needed precise, real-time knowledge of how hard participants were pinching.

Our SingleTact S15-4.5N sensor, built into a small handheld cube, measured that pinch force at 100Hz, giving the team the ground-truth data needed to trigger the vibration at exactly the right moment and force level.

Thank you to the KAIST team for putting SingleTact to work in such a creative application of tactile sensing.

Read the full paper: "Finger Tendon Vibration: Finger Movement Illusions for Immersive Virtual Object Interaction," ACM CHI 2026, Barcelona.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790557

04/09/2025

Capacitive sensing explained: simple, smart, versatile

Dive into an exploration of capacitive tactile force sensing—a technology that’s redefining precision and design. Learn how ultra‑thin sensors (only 0.3 mm thick) can detect even the gentlest touch with remarkable accuracy, and why they're must-haves across industries from medical to aerospace.

Explore the advantages—from superior EMC resilience and flexible form factors to customisable sensing ranges—and learn about the real-world applications that make them indispensable.

Curious how mutual capacitance differs from the typical proximity sensors? Or why these sensors excel in noisy electromagnetic environments? This article reveals all.

Read on to see how SingleTact is raising the bar for force‑sensing technology.

https://www.singletact.com/understanding-capacitive-sensors-types-functions-and-applications

Explore the types, functions, and applications of capacitive sensors. Enhance your understanding and discover how they can improve your projects. Read more!

13/08/2025

🚀 Precision Matters in Surgical Robotics

A recent study from 고려대학교 Korea University has unveiled a compact, two-degree-of-freedom surgical tool insertion robot that could transform minimally invasive procedures like ERCP and PCI. Using a novel Chebyshev lambda mechanism, the system delivers smooth, continuous insertion and rotation while reducing size and complexity.

Our SingleTact ultra-thin capacitive force sensor played a vital role in validating this breakthrough. Installed between the robot’s internal grippers, SingleTact precisely measured the gripping forces applied to surgical tools - proving the robot can consistently exceed the minimum force required for safe catheter manipulation without causing damage.

It’s another example of how SingleTact’s high-resolution force sensing helps bring innovative medical robotics from concept to reality.
Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rcs.70095

25/06/2025

🔧 From Flat Films to Functional Forms: How SingleTact Enabled Breakthroughs in 3D Soft Electronics

A recent Science Advances (May 2025) publication introduces a novel thermoforming process for shaping ultra-thin 2D films into fully functional 3D electronics - opening the door to scalable, high-performance soft devices for wearables, robotics, and beyond.

To validate performance and deformation behaviour, the researchers (such as Jungrak Choi from KAIST) selected our ultra-thin SingleTact capacitive force sensor as their pressure-sensing benchmark.

🧪 Why it mattered:
- SingleTact provided reliable, real-time pressure data during and after thermoforming
- The sensor’s sub-millimetre thickness and high repeatability made it ideal for curved, deformable surfaces
- It enabled the team to confirm sensor integrity and functional performance within complex 3D geometries

📈 This study is more than a proof of concept. It's a turning point for manufacturing flexible, shape-conforming electronics that are both smart and scalable.

💡 It also shows a growing trend:
High-precision capacitive sensors like aren’t just used in final products, they’re critical tools for validating innovative processes and next-gen fabrication methods

If you’re developing soft robotics, conformable interfaces, or high-performance wearables, we’d love to collaborate.

Learn more about SingleTact at:
https://www.singletact.com/

Read the full study here:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv0057