All-in-one self-powered wearable biosensors systems

Abstract

Wearable biosensors capable of long-term operation facilitate future precision medicine and personalized health monitoring by in-situ acquisition, real-time processing, and continuous transmission of biological signals. Self-powered technologies provide effective strategies to achieve the above goals, but make the entire bioelectronic system more complex. Ultimately, challenges of material engineering, miniaturization, and performance enhancement converge into the all-in-one engineering of self-powered wearable biosensor systems. Matching the power output of the energy module with the power consumption requirements of the signal module is the basic prerequisite for achieving all-in-one design. This review takes power as the entry point to comprehensively analyze and summarize the mechanisms, performance ranges, enhancement strategies, application examples, and future prospects of self-powered wearable biosensors. We review the principles, engineering strategies, and capabilities in energy collection, management, and storage of current self-powered technologies to determine the output power range and methods for performance enhancement. Next, we discuss and compare the strategies and mechanisms for signal acquisition, processing, and transmission, focusing on the performance, size, wearability and enhancement strategies of each module. Most importantly, we summarize the four representative all-in-one engineering strategies in the system, covering design principles, basic materials, targeted parts, integration levels, advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we outline key challenges and potential solutions for six modules in preparation for intelligent and networked sensing.