Self Powered Smart Sensing System

Wearable electronics experienced a blooming prosperity in the past decade due to the intrinsic characteristics, such as miniaturization, intellectualization and flexibility. As either sensing devices for information collection or mobile terminates for data exchange, wearable electronics play an important role in modern society, but the further wider applications essentially depend on overcoming the restriction of power source, which demands the properties of sustainability, high-output performance, maintenance free and flexibility or even stretchability. Moreover, an attractive future vision of the development of wearable electronics is to integrate the separated components, including the complete chain of sensing-proceeding-responding as well as powering, to realize self-powered flexible microsystems. According to the quantitative comparison and the qualitative analysis, the emerging power technology named triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is considered as a promising approach to address the challenges above. Based on the combination of electrification effect and electrostatic induction, tirboelectric nanogenerators have been demonstrated to be a robust power source by scavenging the mechanical energy from the ambient. Furthermore, a new concept of active sensors based on TENG was proposed by using the quantitative relation between electrical signals and environmental changes, meanwhile, the electricity generated by TENG can be utilized to power other functional parts including wearable microsystems. Thus, this paper reviews the feasibility of "all-in-one" self-powered flexible microsystems by introducing the technology of triboelectric nanogenerator from the following aspects, i.e. working principles, materials, serving as active sensors, driving actuators, integrated systems.