Towards Wearable Electronic Devices: Piezoelectric Glove Design and Test

This article presents the results of a design and measurements about the electric energy recovered from piezoelectric elements arranged on each finger of a 3D printed human hand, mechanically excited and connected in series and parallel configurations. The proposed energy harvesting characterization system consists of a mechanical hand, made with a 3D printer, which operates by means of a microcontroller in order to replicate the movements of a human hand, while piezoelectric strips (PZT) are applied on an ad hoc glove, acting as a biomechanical energy harvester. Different configurations for the 5 piezoelectric strips have been considered. Measured results with both a parallel and series configuration, with different glove loads, have demonstrated that, using the considered commercial PZT strips, a 1μW power can be reached.