Wearable bending wireless sensing with autonomous wake-up by piezoelectric and triboelectric hybrid nanogenerator

Abstract

The Internet of Things calls for the demand for wearable self-powered sensors for human motion monitoring and interaction. However, the redundant data and large amount of power consumption limit the application in sustainable wireless sensing. In this study, a flexible hybrid nanogenerator with bridge structure design for self-powered wearable sensor is proposed. When harvesting energy from the finger bent motion, it combines contact separation mode for triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with bending d31 mode for piezoelectric generator (PEG). To highlight the significance, we propose an autonomous wake-up wireless sensing method by hybrid generator in wearable bending. Different from recording and transmitting data all the time, the TENG signal as a trigger to record the PEG voltage amplitude as angle sensing data for wireless transmitting. Concise and accurate sensing data with autonomous wake-up is expected to reduce the computational burden and power consumption for wireless sensing and provide more possibilities for wearable wireless monitoring and human-computer interaction. The wireless manipulator interaction experiment based on this hybrid nanogenerator as wearable bending sensor verifies the feasibility of this scheme, which has a great application prospect in wearable self-powered sensors field such as virtual reality and robot control.