Wearable technology

Battery (electricity)

Motion (physics)

Gene

Quantum mechanics

Voltage

Wireless sensor network

Engineering

Materials science

Embedded system

Robustness (evolution)

Telecommunications

Power (physics)

Biochemistry

Computer science

Energy harvesting

Computer network

Physics

Triboelectric effect

Wearable computer

Bluetooth

Artificial intelligence

Motion sensors

Composite material

Chemistry

Wireless

Nanogenerator

Human motion

Electrical engineering

Power management

Science Advances

Wireless wearable sweat biosensors have gained huge traction due to their potential for noninvasive health monitoring. As high energy consumption is a crucial challenge in this field, efficient energy harvesting from human motion represents an attractive approach to sustainably power future wearables. Despite intensive research activities, most wearable energy harvesters suffer from complex fabrication procedures, poor robustness, and low power density, making them unsuitable for continuous biosensing. Here, we propose a highly robust, mass-producible, and battery-free wearable platform that efficiently extracts power from body motion through a flexible printed circuit board (FPCB)-based freestanding triboelectric nanogenerator (FTENG). The judiciously engineered FTENG displays a high power output of ~416 mW m-2 Through seamless system integration and efficient power management, we demonstrate a battery-free triboelectrically driven system that is able to power multiplexed sweat biosensors and wirelessly transmit data to the user interfaces through Bluetooth during on-body human trials.

Wireless battery-free wearable sweat sensor powered by human motion