Self-Powered Triboelectric Inertial Sensor Ball for IoT and Wearable Applications

Motion monitoring can provide useful information for rehabilitation or diagnostics purpose. Recently, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has developed rapidly as a promising technology for energy harvesting and self-powered sensing. However, research effort of using TENG for multi-axis acceleration sensing is very limited. What is more, rotation sensing has not been achieved by TENG to date. Here we propose a 3-dimensional (3D) symmetric triboelectric nanogenerator based inertial sensor ball (TENG-Ball) for self-powered multi-axis acceleration and rotation sensing. The TENG-Ball has great potential in motion monitoring, internet-of-things (IoT) and wearable applications. (paper)