Review—Human-Body Powered Biosensing Textiles: Body-Power Generating Wearables Based on Textiles for Human Biomonitoring

Abstract

The rise of wearable technology has gradually shifted modern health monitoring from clinical to personal use. Smart wearables can collect physiological signals and show them directly on a smartphone. In contemporary healthcare scenarios, this big data could aid medical doctors in online health analysis. Most currently available wearables are designed to monitor specific health parameters, while the combination of many devices is practically not convenient and not cost-effective. Therefore, a strong trend is towards the development of multifunctional devices. This demands, however, alternative sources of power other than conventional batteries. The concept of human-body-powered biosensing textiles (HBBTs) addresses this challenge. By harvesting energy produced from the human body such as motion, pressure, vibration, heat, and metabolites and converting them into electricity, HBBTs could potentially work without a battery. Additionally, the textiles themselves provide a suitable substrate for interconnects and biosensors, such that a system based on HBBTs could provide multifunctional health monitoring. This review explains the fundamental theories, the classification, the energy-conversion efficiency assessment, and the possible biomonitoring applications of HBBTs. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges for technology maturity and the perspectives of HBBTs in shaping the future of health monitoring.

Miniaturized Microfluidic Electrochemical Biosensors Powered by Enzymatic Biofuel Cell

“…These advantages of EBFC-SPBs greatly stimulate researchers' enthusiasm. Efforts to advance the sensing functions enabled EBFC-SPBs to play a major role in the fields of environment monitoring, artificial organs, and disease diagnosis and therapy [7,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Significantly, with the growing demand for personalized, portable medical devices, the portability, one of the most distinctive properties of EBFC-SPBs, has attracted tremendous interest [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…In addition to the advantage of electric energy self-sufficiency, microfluidic EBFC-SPBs can be built on functional substrates (such as flexible and lightweight substrates) with millimeter-sized channels using a simple methods [12,19,31,33,34,42]. Considering that the electrode reactions proceed in the millimeter-sized channels, the demand for catalysts and samples decreased, and eventually, the cost of EBFC-SPBs significantly decreased.…”

“…Additionally, the electrolyte can automatically flow into the millimeter-sized channel due to the capillary action, further simplifying the sensor structure [36,47,48]. Taken together, the small microfluidic EBFC-SPB (µ-EBFC-SPB) shows great application potential in creating disposable, wearable, and portable bio-sensing devices [12,19,20]. Nevertheless, it is a great challenge to modify the materials and catalysts on centimeter-sized or even millimetersized electrodes.…”