A paradigm shift toward active resistive sensing driven by triboelectric nanogenerator

The rapid development of diverse wearable sensors and systems in the era of internet of things and metaverse raises a significantly increasing demand for distributed power supplies and power consumption management, which facilitates worldwide research hotspots in the fields of self-powered active sensing and ambient energy harvesting. The past decade has witnessed the thriving of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) as self-powered sensors and energy harvesters in wearable electronics, yet their intrinsic limitations of monomodal kinetic response, discontinuous transient outputs, and environmental susceptibility have inevitably hindered their practical applications. Here, through incorporating the self-generated characteristics of TENGs and the multimodal continuous sensing capabilities of resistive sensors, we propose an active resistive sensing platform to enable a new modality shift toward self-powered, multimodal, continuous, and robust monitoring. A generalized model consisting of arbitrary TENGs and resistive sensors is developed to lay the theoretic foundation for the platform. Various TENG-driven active resistive sensing systems with continuous and multimodal sensing capabilities are implemented and validated for wearable applications. The developed TENG-DARS platform can be also applied beyond wearable sensing scenarios, facilitating a paradigm shift of sensing modality toward self-powered, multimodal, continuous, and robust monitoring in the era of the Internet of Things and metaverse.