WE-CARE (WEarable self-powered textile sensors for health CARE applications) -

Project Title: “WE-CARE: WEarable self-powered textile sensors for health CARE applications”

Project Duration: 10/2022 – 09/2025

Project Description:

Wearable sensors integrated into clothes hold the potential of revolutionizing personalized healthcare and telemedicine, enabling the continuous and noninvasive monitoring of human vital signals, and providing critical information and alerts to patients. These devices require suitable power sources that allow their continuous operation. Emerging wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), energy harvesters that convert abundant mechanical energy into electrical sources, are attractive solutions to realize self-power and sustainable sensors. The development of reliable textile-based triboelectric sensors is paramount to addressing the challenge of powering wearable sensors by using a sustainable and renewable energy source. To reach these objectives, there is an urgent need to develop reliable and scalable textile-based TENGs devices that can be fabricated with existing textile technologies to meet the stringent requirements of both device industrialization and truly wearable green power sources and sensors.

In this context, WE-CARE project aims at realizing sustainable and wearable textile-based triboelectric sensors for the detection of human breathing, pulse, and motions realized through traditional textile manufacturing techniques (e.g., embroidery, knitting, or stitching).

WE-CARE is an interdisciplinary and interfaculty project at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, which proposes to combine expertise in electronics, energy, and biosensors from the Faculty of Engineering with expertise in computer science, smart textile interfaces of the Faculty of Computer Science. The interdisciplinarity is a key aspect of the success of this project. Indeed, one of the aims of WE-CARE is the development of effective interaction and a communication channel between experts in different fields, computer science, textile, and electronics in order to improve innovative research. The project has the aim to overcome the current limitations of the state of the art of textile-based triboelectric sensors both contributing to advancing the understanding and basic knowledge of this technology, which still is not fully understood and improving the current manufacturability of TENG devices, which presents still many difficulties and challenges ahead that remain to be overcome.

The outcomes of the project are expected to contribute not only to different scientific communities and industrial research and development but also overall to our society. Indeed, the WE-CARE project is closely linked to sustainability from different points of view, the improvement of healthcare, the development of sustainable green energy, and the innovation that can be described by the three UN Sustainable Development Goals, “Good health and well-being”, “Affordable and clean energy”, “Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure”, to which it is associated. The implementation of the project will allow bridging the gap between innovations and industry and among different research sectors, fostering the diffusion of knowledge and promoting the transfer of new products on the market. Moreover, the dissemination of the project will raise consumer awareness of the need for sustainable and green electronics and the social acceptance of telemedicine.