Advances in Healthcare Electronics Enabled by Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Abstract

The treatment, diagnosis, and monitoring of diseases have attracted more and more attention in recent years. Healthcare electronics help effectively treat and real-time monitor diseases. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) show great potential for healthcare applications because of their superiority including low cost, flexible structures, and self-powered property. Herein, the recent key advancements in TENG-based healthcare applications are comprehensively reviewed. TENGs could not only harvest the mechanical energy from the body to make electrical stimulation but also generate different electrical signals in response to external stimuli. Integrated systems combined with TENGs and other sensors could also promote sensing stability. The materials, structures, working mechanisms, and performance of each application are discussed. The existing limitations and prospects for further TENG-based healthcare are finally put forward.

Wearable Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Therapeutics

“…Moreover, TENG devices can be fabricated using a broad range of biocompatible materials, spanning synthetics to natural, allowing flexible, soft, lightweight, bioconformable, biocompatible, and even bioabsorbable properties [31]. Considering wearable therapeutics require on-body devices with conformability and biocompatibility for individualized treatment, wearable TENGs (W-TENGs) could provide an emerging technology with which to deliver timely, precise, and longterm treatment as on-body therapeutics [32][33][34][35][36].…”

Triboelectric Nanogenerators and Hybridized Systems for Enabling Next-Generation IoT Applications

“…As for the multisource energy harvesting, TENG-integrated PyENG, TEG, and SC under the same platform will be more favorable in terms of facile systemic integration and structural complexity reduction. By further integrating the hybrid generators with efficient PMCs, energy storage units, and other functional components, self-sustainable hybridized systems can be realized for a wide range of applications, e.g., environmental monitoring, human activity sensation, human-machine interaction, smart home, healthcare, wearables, implants, virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR), robotics, IoT, and artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) [ 142 , 226 – 229 ].…”

Wearable triboelectric sensors for biomedical monitoring and human-machine interface

“…Among numerous advanced wearable technologies, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with its significant advantages of self-power, high output, light weight, applicability of design, low cost, stability and robustness etc. has drawn many researchers' attention ( Chen et al., 2020 ; Shi et al., 2019b ; Wang, 2020a ; Xu et al., 2020 ). TENG is first invented in 2012 for energy harvesting ( Fan et al., 2012 ; Wang et al., 2012 ).…”