TEXTILE-BASED TRIBOELECTRIC NANOGENERATORS FOR HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

This thesis reports the development of wearable textile-based triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) for healthcare applications. Firstly a soft textile has been developed using a facile dip-coating process, with an optimized triboelectric output. Various physical sensors in the textile platform are developed for motion sensing and gait detection. The energy harvesting capabilities out of various body parts of the textile-based TENGs are also investigated. A novel wearable glove-based Human Machine Interface (HMI) with intuitive controlling commands has been demonstrated for diversified control applications in real/cyber space. To further boost up the triboelectric output, a novel narrow-gap one-piece TENG textile has been developed, which highly resembles the normal garments and can be attached to multiple body parts for energy harvesting. Integrating the TENG textiles with other functional components, wearable textile systems for diversified healthcare applications have been developed, including gait monitoring, homecare communication, rehabilitation, self-sustainable IoT node, and exosuit.