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

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.