Heart-rate monitoring plays a critical role in personal healthcare management. A low-cost, noninvasive, and user-friendly heart-rate monitoring system is highly desirable. Here, a self-powered wireless body sensor network (BSN) system is developed for heart-rate monitoring via integration of a downy-structure-based triboelectric nanogenerator (D-TENG), a power management circuit, a heart-rate sensor, a signal processing unit, and Bluetooth module for wireless data transmission. By converting the inertia energy of human walking into electric power, a maximum power of 2.28 mW with total conversion efficiency of 57.9% was delivered at low operation frequency, which is capable of immediately and sustainably driving the highly integrated BSN system. The acquired heart-rate signal by the sensor would be processed in the signal process circuit, sent to an external device via the Bluetooth module, and displayed on a personal cell phone in a real-time manner. Moreover, by combining a TENG-based generator and a TENG-based sensor, an all-TENG-based wireless BSN system was developed, realizing continuous and self-powered heart-rate monitoring. This work presents a potential method for personal heart-rate monitoring, featured as being self-powered, cost-effective, noninvasive, and user-friendly.

Sleeping disorder is a major health threatening in high-pace modern society. Characterizing sleep behavior with pressure-sensitive, simple fabrication, and decent washability still remains a challenge and highly desired. Here, a pressure-sensitive, large-scale, and washable smart textile is reported based on triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) array as bedsheet for real-time and self-powered sleep behavior monitoring. Fabricated by conductive fibers and elastomeric materials with a wave structure, the TENG units exhibit desirable features including high sensitivity, fast response time, durability, and water resistance, and are interconnected together, forming a pressure sensor array. Furthermore, highly integrated data acquisition, processing, and wireless transmission system is established and equipped with the sensor array to realize real-time sleep behavior monitoring and sleep quality evaluation. Moreover, the smart textile can further serve as a self-powered warning system in the case of an aged nonhospitalized patients falling down from the bed, which will immediately inform the medical staff. This work not only paves a new way for real-time noninvasive sleep monitoring, but also presents a new perspective for the practical applications of remote clinical medical service.

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