WEarable self-powered textile sensors for health CARE applications

Wearable sensors integrated into clothes hold the potential of revolutionizing personalized healthcare and telemedicine, enabling the continuous and noninvasive monitoring of human vital signals, and providing critical information and alerts to patients. These devices require suitable power sources that allow their continuous operation. Emerging wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), energy harvesters that convert abundant mechanical energy into electrical sources, are attractive solutions to realize self-power and sustainable sensors. The development of reliable textile-based triboelectric sensors is paramount to addressing the challenge of powering wearable sensors by using a sustainable and renewable energy source. To reach these objectives, there is an urgent need to develop reliable and scalable textile-based TENGs devices that can be fabricated with existing textile technologies to meet the stringent requirements of both device industrialization and truly wearable green power sources and sensors.

In this context, we would like to design and implement sustainable and wearable textile-based triboelectric sensors for the detection of human breathing, pulse, and motions realized through traditional textile manufacturing techniques (e.g., embroidery, knitting, or stitching).

Team

Giuseppe Ciccone, Martina Aurora Costa Angeli (Sensing Technology Lab), Michael Haller