Development of Triboelectric Sensors for IoT and Wearable Applications

With the development trends of the wearable electronic devices in miniaturization, lightweight, and portability, a sustainable power providing solution is needed to meet the requirement of the coming intelligent world. Triboelectric nanogenerators have become a promising energy harvesting technology during the past few years with significant development across the world, due to their diverse flexible/stretchable configurations, no material limitation, and high output performance, which also can transfer surrounding environmental mechanical stimuli into electricity effectively. Triboelectric nanogenerators also can actively function as self-powered sensors and actuators to detect, monitor, interact and respond to the ambient changes induced by environment or human, which can be key components to achieve sustainable functional systems. Therefore, the application of triboelectric nanogenerators on wearable electronics yields a highly advanced technology to realize self-powered, flexible, and smart functional systems. In this review, the progress development of triboelectric nanogenerators and wearable electronics technology is firstly reviewed. Then various human machine interaction systems enabled by the integration of triboelectric nanogenerators and IoT technology are presented to show the feasibility to achieve sustainable functional systems. Furthermore, the perspective of future research direction of triboelectric nanogenerators is proposed from hybrid sensors and photonics integrated systems.