A wrist-band coupled, human skin based triboelectric generator for harvesting biomechanical energy

Effectively harvesting ambient mechanical energy is very important for realizing self-powered and autonomous electronics, which has numerous applications in sensor networks, wireless devices, and wearable or implantable electronics, etc. This paper presented a human skin based triboelectric generator (TEG), coupled to a light and flexible wrist-band to be used for wearable smart device applications. We developed a simple, cost effective, and feasible fabrication method of a micro-structured Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) thin film as one of the triboelectric layers, the other layer being the human skin. Here, electricity was generated by repetitive contact-separation actions between these two triboelectric surfaces. Results showed the fabricated prototype is capable of generating a maximum open circuit voltage of 28.2V and 12μW peak power by mild finger pressing over the device at 2.9Hz frequency. The proposed harvester responds to low-frequency kinetic energy of human-body-induced motion; so it has the potential to convert the mechanical energy of finger pressing into electrical energy.