Journal article
AI-enabled piezoelectric wearable for joint torque monitoring
- Abstract:
- Joint health is critical for musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions that are affecting approximately one-third of the global population. Monitoring of joint torque can offer an important pathway for the evaluation of joint health and guided intervention. However, there is no technology that can provide the precision, effectiveness, low-resource setting, and long-term wearability to simultaneously achieve both rapid and accurate joint torque measurement to enable risk assessment of joint injury and long-term monitoring of joint rehabilitation in wider environments. Herein, we propose a piezoelectric boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs)-based, AI-enabled wearable device for regular monitoring of joint torque. We first adopted an iterative inverse design to fabricate the wearable materials with a Poisson's ratio precisely matched to knee biomechanics. A highly sensitive piezoelectric film was constructed based on BNNTs and polydimethylsiloxane and applied to precisely capture the knee motion, while concurrently realizing self-sufficient energy harvesting. With the help of a lightweight on-device artificial neural network, the proposed wearable device was capable of accurately extracting targeted signals from the complex piezoelectric outputs and then effectively mapping these signals to their corresponding physical characteristics, including torque, angle, and loading. A real-time platform was constructed to demonstrate the capability of fine real-time torque estimation. This work offers a relatively low-cost wearable solution for effective, regular joint torque monitoring that can be made accessible to diverse populations in countries and regions with heterogeneous development levels, potentially producing wide-reaching global implications for joint health, MSK conditions, ageing, rehabilitation, personal health, and beyond.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 11.2MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s40820-025-01753-w
Authors
+ European Union
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/019w4f821
- Grant:
- 101099093
- Programme:
- Horizon Europe
+ Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/0439y7842
- Grant:
- EP/W009412/1
- EP/Z534146/1
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nano-Micro Letters More from this journal
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 247
- Place of publication:
- Germany
- Publication date:
- 2025-05-03
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-03-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2150-5551
- ISSN:
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2311-6706
- Pmid:
-
40316813
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2121701
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2121701
- Deposit date:
-
2025-05-07
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Chang et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- ©2025 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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