Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting for Wearable and Implantable Devices

Energy harvesting devices aim to harness the wasted energy from various energy sources available in their environment including thermal energy, kinetic energy, electrostatic energy, and solar energy. The relevance of such devices increased with the emergence of low power and micro/nano scale electronics. By utilizing the human body motion, piezoelectric energy can be generated. The human body motion can be either external or internal including movements, breathing, and blood pressure. This plays a critical role in the development of self-powered wearable and implantable biomedical devices, that can be used for personalized medical treatment and health monitoring through processing and analysis of continuously collected physiological signals. Thus, this article presents a study of the state of the art energy harvesting from human body methods that utilize the piezoelectric effect. Mainly, the focus is on harvesting human body motion using wearable and implantable devices. Further, issues and challenges in the current technologies are discussed.