Recent Progress in Wearable Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Advanced Health Monitoring and Rehabilitation

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have become a vital technology in physical health monitoring and rehabilitation applications, enabling continuous, personalized, and convenient monitoring, facilitating early detection and prevention, and offering valuable data-driven insights. On-body wearable triboelectric sensors enable real-time tracking of vital health parameters, promoting accurate and personalized healthcare interventions. In addition to being self-powered, these sensors facilitate early detection and prevention by capturing early warning signs of potential health issues, leading to timely interventions. Furthermore, they play a vital role in rehabilitation monitoring and feedback, helping to assess progress during the recovery process. This continuous monitoring, along with artificial intelligence, provides data-driven insights into patterns, trends, and correlations, facilitating evidence-based healthcare decision-making. In this review, we provide an overview of the recent wearable TENG developments for healthcare applications. We discuss how TENGs work and explore a wide range of self-powered health monitoring and rehabilitation applications. We then summarize recent advancements in healthcare applications, material selection, and unique features to help design highly efficient, accurate, and practical bioapplicable technology. Further, we discuss the challenges and prospects of the TENGs technology for healthcare applications, including miniaturization, moisture resistance, device maintenance, data reliability, and high outpower requirements.