If you are lucky, you can contact a manufacturer of pressure sensor and hope that 1) they will answer a small customer 2) the guy answering really knows his stu

If you are lucky, you can contact a manufacturer of pressure sensor and hope that 1) they will answer a small customer 2) the guy answering really knows his stuff. Big names in the space would be Honeywell or TE Connectivity. As so happens I worked with pressure sensors before. My slightly above noob answer would be that most pressure sensors aren't suitable for you both in form factor and cost. Normally built to connect to some tube. A load cell that goes into a scale might work, but that could get expensive if you need many data points. If you need MANY data points and have low accuracy requirements (like if you want to draw a heat map) you could create a network of piezoelectric films. Piezoelectric materials generate a charge upon pressure. This would be trickier to make if there isn't one on market.