Abstract
Research interest in the development of real‐time monitoring of personal health indicators using wearable electrocardiographic systems has intensified in recent years. New advanced thermoelectrics are potentially a key enabling technology that can be used to transform human body heat into power for use in wearable electrographic monitoring devices. This work provides a systematic review of the potential application of thermoelectric generators for use as power sources in wearable electrocardiographic monitoring systems. New strategies on miniaturized rigid thermoelectric modules combined with batteries or supercapacitors can provide adequate power supply for wearable electrocardiographic systems. Flexible thermoelectric generators can also support wearable electrocardiographic systems directly when a heat sink is incorporated into the design in order to enlarge and stabilize the temperature gradient. Recent advances in enhancing the performance of novel fiber/fabric based flexible thermoelectrics has opened up an exciting direction for the development of wearable electrocardiographic systems.
Highlights
We comprehensively review the module design strategies that have been adopted to optimize power output of flexible thermoelectric generators for electrocardiographic monitoring systems before highlighting the physical, mechanical, and thermoelectric properties of materials utilized in flexible thermoelectric generators
This review has systematically presented and discussed current research on thermoelectric power generators for application as power sources in wearable electrocardiographic monitoring systems
Current studies of thermoelectric electrocardiographic systems are still focusing on utilizing traditional rigid thermoelectric materials
Summary
Addressing the health and lifestyle needs of an increasingly ageing population represents one of the great social challenges facing society and this is driving the development of a range of real time health monitoring technologies suitable for easy adoption by elderly citizens.[1,2] Electrocardiographic monitoring systems can provide real time heart function signal information including heartbeat periodicity and cardiac of a new generation of thermoelectric generators, which can realize eco-friendly, silent, mechanically simple form of direct energy conversion between heat and electricity suitable for use as power sources for cardiographic health monitoring systems.[4,8,9,10,11,12]. These modules are composed of p-n junctions connected in series In such a module, both the p-type and n-type thermoelectric materials are important for the overall energy conversion efficiency.[35,36,37] The maximum energy conversion efficiency (η) of thermoelectric generators is directly dominated by the material dimensionless figure of merit, zT = S2σ⋅T/κ = S2σ⋅T/(κl+κe), where S, σ, T, κ, κe, and κl are the Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, temperature, total thermal conductivity, electrical thermal conductivity (κe = LσT, and L is Lorenz factor[11,38,39,40]) and lattice thermal conductivity, respectively.[27,41,42,43,44] Higher zT values lead to higher η (Figure 2h).[11,45,46,47] The strategy to enlarge η is driving the research and design agenda to enhance the thermoelectric power output and minimize the power source requirements in order to provide solutions for electrocardiographic system design and manufacture.[48,49,50,51]. We identify promising research directions for the field of thermoelectric powered electrocardiographic systems
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