Piezoelectric mechanical energy harvester (MEH) has been developed as an important emerging variant of piezoelectric devices. Experiments in the literature show that the voltage–time curves of piezoelectric devices encompass both positive and negative characteristics even though the strain in the piezoelectric material is always positive during the applied cycling load. This does not agree with the results predicted by the piezoelectric theory of open circuit. Here, both the experiments and theory are performed to understand this important problem. A zirconate titanate (PZT) MEH is fabricated and the output voltages are recorded with three voltmeters. It is found that the measured voltages depend on the resistance of voltmeter. The peak value of voltage increases with the increase of the resistance of voltmeter, which is contrary to the established knowledge that the measurement results are independent of the instruments used. A theoretical model considering the voltmeter with finite resistance is established. The charge is allowed to go through the voltmeter and switch the directions during increasing and releasing of strain. The results by this model agree well with those from the experiments. The findings suggest that the resistance of voltmeter should be reported for voltage measurement of the piezoelectric devices.

Flexible and wearable electronics integrated with various sensors have great potential for applications in monitoring human activities and personal health. Bending and tension/compression dominate the deformation modes yielded by flexure of joints and diverse body gestures. A key challenge now is to sense the curvature/bending angle, while much research has been focused on the strain sensors for tension/compression. Alternative approaches by strain sensors or noncontact optical methods for curvature sensing are not practical for wearable electronics. A novel adhesion‐free thin‐film‐like curvature sensor that can monitor bending activities is introduced for flexible and wearable electronics. This study presents comprehensive design, fabrication, mechanism, structural analysis, performance characterization, and device‐level demonstrations for bending of joints, gesture recognition, and real‐time sitting posture correction. The most prominent advantage of the present sensor is that the measurement is independent of the strain of the target surface and the interfacial slippage, thus the perfect adhesion between the sensor and the surface is unnecessary. The features of adhesion‐free, simple mechanical principle, low cost, and satisfactory monitoring results highlight the superiority of the present curvature sensors for practical applications to flexible and wearable electronics.