Flexible Thermoelectric Belt: Enabling Recyclable Wearables for Self-Powered Gesture Recognition

Abstract Flexible thermoelectric devices offer a promising approach for harvesting low-grade waste heat from the human body to sustainably power wearable electronics. Here, a fully flexible thermoelectric generator (f-TEG) based on a sandwich architecture is presented, utilizing high-performance n-type Bi2Te2.7Se0.3 and p-type Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 materials as the active thermoelectric units, with liquid metal serving as the electrode. This design circumvents the need for conventional surface metallization and intricate soldering processes. To enhance the substrate’s thermal conductivity, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composite incorporating 20 wt % aluminum nitride (AlN) ceramic nanoparticles was employed for encapsulation. This approach yielded a thermal conductivity of 0.45 W m–1 K–1, approximately three times that of pure PDMS. The f-TEG devices demonstrated outstanding mechanical and electrical robustness, maintaining structural integrity and stable performance after 10,000 h of cyclic reorientation and 100,000 cycles of dynamic twisting. Moreover, both the thermoelectric materials and liquid metal could be nondestructively recovered and reused via simple mechanical peeling. As a proof of concept, the f-TEG units were monolithically integrated into a wearable belt. Powered solely by body heat at an ambient temperature of 25 °C, the integrated system stably delivered an output voltage of 180.6 mV. By incorporating a lightweight depthwise separable GRU network (DSGNet, 11.95 kB) that synergistically models features through depthwise separable convolutions and gated recurrent units, a posture recognition accuracy of 98.96% was achieved. This work establishes a feasible technological pathway toward constructing self-powered, intelligent human body protection systems that simultaneously offer long operational lifetime and facile manufacturability.