Flexible triboelectric nanogenerator for human motion tracking and gesture recognition

Abstract Nowadays human motion tracking and gesture recognition have gained increasing attention as they allow humans to control machines through natural and intuitive behaviors by recognizing meaningful expressions. Here, we propose a stretchable, high durability and deformable triboelectric nanogenerator (F-TENG) on the base of silica gel, which can be used to not only collect mechanical energy from our ambient environment, but also monitor human motion and behaviors through the highly sensitive response to the complex states of human motion, such as stretching, folding, extrusion and hitting. The clutter in the signals can be effectively collected by the integrated filtering circuit, thus the function of real-time statistics of human motion and behaviors can be recorded and interpreted. This work promotes the broad application prospects of TENGs in artificial intelligence, sporting monitoring, and big data collection.