Breathable, durable, flexible, and battery-free full action response electronic textiles toward simply achieving the function of human skin

Abstract

Recently, the advantages of electronic textiles (e-textiles) for electronic skin have attracted great attention. As epidermal electronic products, they need to possess characteristics such as portability, comfortable to wear, durability, and easy to manufacture. However, in practical application scenarios, wearable electronics need to make trade-offs between various functions. Here, we propose a lightweight and breathable multi-functional electronic skin based on the idea of e-textiles, which employs an approach using nanogenerators (NGs), a simple electrospinning and three-dimensional printing (3D-print) process to fabricate a scalable, porous, and triboelectric-conductive-piezoelectric (T-C-P) multilayer structure-based electronic skin (e-skin) called TPSA. The piezoelectric-triboelectric hybrid nanogenerator exhibits remarkable electrical behavior due to its unique coupling enhancement effect. TPSA achieves excellent generating capacity (output of up to 105 kV/m2, 1.87 mA/m2, 29.4 mW/m2 in single-electrode working mode), enables full-scale human motion detection, achieves EMI shielding performance of 46.9 dB, possesses a high killing rate of Escherichia coli up to 99%, and exhibits good air permeability up to 35.453 cm3/(m2 *d*Pa). This electronic skin can perform some of the functions of the skin, quickly and without power monitoring of physiological signals and joint movements throughout the body, while ensuring comfort and protection. This work provides a strategy for easy access to versatile e-skins with excellent utility.