Performance analysis of triboelectric energy harvester designs for knee implants

Triboelectric energy harvesters continue to show promising and efficient performance in transferring mechanical energy into electrical energy, making them a prime candidate for biomedical implants. Total Knee Replacement (TKR) is a widely used surgery worldwide and, more so, in the United States. In this paper, triboelectric performance in biomedical applications is evaluated, especially in TKR. Performance of two new configurations of triboelectric energy harvester in TKR is compared as self-powered implanted sensors for loads measurements. The first configuration is a full knee harvester, covering the whole area of the tibial tray. The second configuration consists of two harvesters at the lateral and medial locations. Both configurations to be fit in the knee implant. The two designs' performance was experimentally evaluated when subjected to an axial cyclic load applied by a dynamic tester at different frequencies. Also, the lateral and medial generators were tested for load imbalance detection producing promising results. Moreover, this study's findings would contribute to the improvement of TKR by transforming them from passive to smart TKR using these implants, which will lead to better health monitoring.