Measuring viscoelastic properties of soft tissues becomes a new biomarker in the medical diagnosis field. It can help in early diagnosis and related fields, such as minimally-invasive-surgery (MIS) applications and cell mechanics. The current work presents a tactile sensor for measuring the damping coefficient of the soft tissues. The proposed sensor can be miniaturized easily and used in MIS applications. Besides the proposed sensor, a mathematical model, based on Jacobsen’s approach, is built to calculate the damping coefficient of the specimens and the surrounding. These damping sources significantly influence the proposed sensor, such as air damping and hysteretic damping. The sensor system principally depends on a piezoelectric transducer, which is cheap, commonly available, and easily integrated into MEMS. To conceptually prove the sensor feasibility, silicon rubber samples with different stiffnesses have been fabricated and tested by the new sensor. The obtained results prove the newly proposed sensor’s capability to differentiate the damping coefficients for soft materials effectively.

测量软组织的粘弹性成为医学诊断领域的新生物标志物。它可以帮助早期诊断和相关领域，例如微创手术 (MIS) 应用和细胞力学。目前的工作提出了一种用于测量软组织阻尼系数的触觉传感器。所提出的传感器可以轻松小型化并用于 MIS 应用。除了所提出的传感器之外，还建立了一个基于 Jacobsen 方法的数学模型来计算样本和周围环境的阻尼系数。这些阻尼源显着影响所提出的传感器，例如空气阻尼和滞后阻尼。传感器系统主要依赖于压电换能器，该换能器价格便宜、普遍可用且易于集成到 MEMS 中。为了从概念上证明传感器的可行性，新传感器制造并测试了具有不同刚度的硅橡胶样品。获得的结果证明了新提出的传感器能​​够有效区分软材料的阻尼系数。