Abstract
The continuous operation of wearable electronics demands reliable sources of energy, currently met through Li-ion batteries and various energy harvesters. These solutions are being used out of necessity despite potential safety issues and unsustainable environmental impact. Safe and sustainable energy sources can boost the use of wearables systems in diverse applications such as health monitoring, prosthetics, and sports. In this regard, sweat- and sweat-equivalent-based studies have attracted tremendous attention through the demonstration of energy-generating biofuel cells, promising power densities as high as 3.5mW cm-2 , storage using sweat-electrolyte-based supercapacitors with energy and power densities of 1.36Wh kg-1 and 329.70 Wkg-1 , respectively, and sweat-activated batteries with an impressive energy density of 67 Ah kg-1 . A combination of these energy generating, and storage devices can lead to fully energy-autonomous wearables capable of providing sustainable power in the µW to mW range, which is sufficient to operate both sensing and communication devices. Here, a comprehensive review covering these advances, addressing future challenges and potential solutions related to fully energy-autonomous wearables is presented, with emphasis on sweat-based energy storage and energy generation elements along with sweat-based sensors as applications.
Highlights
The continuous operation of wearable electronics demands reliable sources of early-warning for COVID-19, exoskeletons, prosthetics, and interactive systems energy, currently met through Li-ion batteries and various energy harvesters
Energy autonomy is key to the generation portable and wearable systems
Recent reports show that the power requirements of advanced sensing and communications can be in the order of several hundred μW. These requirements generally align with sweat-based generators such as biofuel cells, and energy storage devices such as supercapacitors, and sweat-activated battery
Summary
The three key components of energy-autonomous wearable systems (Figure 1a) are: a) energy generators or harvesters; b) energy storage devices, and c) system level integration strategies for power management, low-power or near off-state ultralow power electronics for data acquisition and control for online sweat monitoring (see Figure 2).
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