New health monitoring patch uses harvested energy

The team, from Japan’s Osaka University in partnership with Joanneum Research in Weiz, Austria, hopes that the work could lead to advances in autonomous health sensors and battery-free wearable electronic devices.

Published in Nature Communications, the team’s paper details how the ultraflexible patches with a ferroelectric polymer can sense a patient’s pulse and blood pressure, powering themselves through normal movement. 

The need for wires or batteries can be inconvenient in providing power to wearable devices, something researchers aim to overcome with this method. The ability for integrated health monitors to use ambient motion to power and activate sensors could also accelerate adoption in doctor’s offices, the team said.

According to researchers, the key was starting with a substrate just one micron thick. Using a strong electric field, ferroelectric crystalline domains in a copolymer were aligned so that the sample had a large electric dipole moment. 

Stretchable system could self-power wearable devices