Single-Thread-Based Wearable and Highly Stretchable Triboelectric Nanogenerators and Their Applications in Cloth-Based Self-Powered Human-Interactive and Biomedical Sensing

Wearable technologies have been considered as the next-generation electronics in the near future owing to their promising applications in a vast of fields ranging from biomedical/wellness monitors, wearable human-interactive interfaces, to shape-adaptive military and consumer electronics.[1–4] Typically, those electronics are needed to be powered by rechargeable batteries. However, conventional power sources like electrochemical batteries suffer from heavy weight, bulky volume, and limited capacity and lifetime, largely hindering the practical and sustainable uses of the wearable electronics. Ideally, the need of electric energy can be all or at least partially harvested and converted from surroundings as sustained and selfsufficient power sources.[2–6] For wearable applications, mechanical energy is the most widely distributed and universally available, such as human motion, walking, mechanical triggering, vibration, and so forth; however, the vast majority of those energies is ignored and wasted simply because there is no technology available for high efficient harvesting. To progress sustainable and selfsufficient applications, it is essential to develop large-area wearable energy-harvesting devices to extract energy from human motions. Besides, one of ultimate goals of wearable electronics is to integrate with textiles and clothes so that the device functions can be conducted along with the fabrics’ advantages such as soft, breathability, comfort, and high sustainability.[7–12] Although the textile-based energy-harvesting devices have been demonstrated with the merits including light, and soft,[13–23] the key issues for clothing uses, such as stability, mechanically stretchability, washability, and manufacturability, still need to be addressed. On the other hand, thread-based tactile sensors have shown their potentials in a wide range of applications such as wearable keyboards, user-interactive interfaces, and motion Single-Thread-Based Wearable and Highly Stretchable Triboelectric Nanogenerators and Their Applications in Cloth-Based Self-Powered Human-Interactive and Biomedical Sensing