Journal
NANO ENERGY
Volume 90, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2021.106486
Keywords
Non-contact triboelectric sensor (NCTS); Activity and walking monitoring; Blind people support; Anti-collision system and proximity sensor; Fall detection; Indoor navigation monitoring
Categories
Funding
- Australian Research Council Future Fellowships Grant [FT130100430]
- Undergraduate Research Scholarship Program 2019 of Southeast University (SEU) in China
- Australian Research Council [FT130100430] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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This article presents a contactless sensing platform that can monitor human movement using flexible Non-Contact Triboelectric Sensors. The system successfully achieves near-field remote monitoring of complex human movements, differentiates activities, and provides assistive care for specific populations.
Continuous monitoring of human motion and its interaction with the surrounding environment is crucial for healthcare applications such as early diagnosis of neurological disorders, or rehabilitation of vulnerable patients with walking difficulties in hospital and age-care settings. Additionally, it is also necessary to provide assistive care to visually impaired individuals who are prone to falls. Commonly used wearable sensors require on-body components, which may cause discomfort. More importantly, the forgetfulness of people in hospital or aged-care settings or their resistance in using the on-body units, undermine the effectiveness of a wearable-based monitoring strategy. The ideal monitoring system should not interfere with the individual's privacy and daily routines and work continuously, without requiring any specific on-body devices. Here, we present a contactless sensing platform that can monitor and distinguish complex movements of human subjects, without requiring them to use wearable devices. The approach uses flexible Non-Contact Triboelectric Sensors (NCTS) (7 x3.6 x0.5 cm3) produced by attaching a negatively pre-charged PDMS film onto an aluminum (Al) foil. By exploiting the sensitivity to external electrostatic charges, near-field remote monitoring of human movements at distances as far as 1.5 m, is successfully achieved. Furthermore, The NCTS system differentiates activities such as walking, running, and jumping; and estimates walking speed, relative position, and direction of two people walking together in a contactless manner, which is not well examined in the literature of Non-contact Triboelectric Sensors, by analyzing the time domain and frequency spectrum of the output signal. Besides, the sensor is integrated with a portable accident prevention system designed to avoid visually impaired people's collisions with obstacles. Falling detection tests provide promising results for their application in elderly safety. Finally, indoor navigation/position monitoring and direction recognition are achieved and demonstrated using multiple NCTS, for future potential applications in elder activity tracking and people counting in hospitals.
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