A Fully Self‐Powered Wearable Leg Movement Sensing System for Human Health Monitoring

Abstract

Energy‐autonomous wearable human activity monitoring is imperative for daily healthcare, benefiting from long‐term sustainable uses. Herein, a fully self‐powered wearable system, enabling real‐time monitoring and assessments of human multimodal health parameters including knee joint movement, metabolic energy, locomotion speed, and skin temperature, which are fully self‐powered by highly‐efficient flexible thermoelectric generators (f‐TEGs) is proposed and developed. The wearable system is composed of f‐TEGs, fabric strain sensors, ultra‐low‐power edge computing, and Bluetooth. The f‐TEGs worn on the leg not only harvest energy from body heat and supply power sustainably for the whole monitoring system, but also serve as zero‐power motion sensors to detect limb movement and skin temperature. The fabric strain sensor made by printing PEDOT: PSS on pre‐stretched nylon fiber‐wrapped rubber band enables high‐fidelity and ultralow‐power measurements on highly‐dynamic knee movements. Edge computing is elaborately designed to estimate multimodal health parameters including time‐varying metabolic energy in real‐time, which are wirelessly transmitted via Bluetooth. The whole monitoring system is operated automatically and intelligently, works sustainably in both static and dynamic states, and is fully self‐powered by the f‐TEGs.