Wearable electronic devices have brought many opportunities and hold great promise for applications in foot health monitoring. However, effective foot monitoring often requires more objective and cost-effective solutions. Here, we present a wearable triboelectric nanogenerator with a magnetic microcone array (MMA-TENG), designed for human gait monitoring. The microcone array is fabricated using a novel cooperative jet printing and magnetization-induction method, offering advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness, mass production, repeatability, and excellent structural uniformity. The fabrication parameters can be precisely optimized to control the geometry of the cone structures, thereby enhancing the device's output performance. The MMA-TENG demonstrates excellent performance in long-term pressure sensing with high sensitivity and a fast response. A deep learning-enabled smart insole system is developed using an insole with four MMA-TENGs, a ConvNeXT-based deep learning algorithm, and a portable circuit board. This system can achieve accurate personal identification and activity monitoring with recognition accuracies of 99.74% and 99.54%, respectively. Additionally, the smart insole system is also applied for flatfoot detection with an accuracy of 99.35%. The proposed MMA-TENG opens up a promising avenue for mass production and highlights its potential for supporting individuals in maintaining and monitoring their foot health effectively.
Wan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.