Human skin, the body’s largest organ, plays a crucial role in perceiving mechanical stimulation and facilitating interaction with the external environment. Leveraging the unique attributes of human skin, electronic skin technology aimed at replicating and surpassing the capabilities of natural skin holds significant promise across various domains, including medical care, motion tracking, and intelligent robotics. In recent research, triboelectric nanogenerators have emerged as a compelling solution for addressing the energy challenge in electronic skins. Triboelectric nanogenerators harness the combination of the triboelectric effect and electrostatic induction to efficiently convert mechanical energy into electrical power, serving as self-powered sensors for electronic skins, which possess the advantages of self-powered operation, cost-effectiveness, and compatibility with a wide range of materials. This review provides an introduction to the working principles and the four operational modes of triboelectric nanogenerators, highlighting the functional features of electronic skins, such as stretchability, self-healing, and degradability. The primary focus is on the current applications of self-powered electronic skins based on triboelectric nanogenerators in medical care, motion tracking, and machine tactile recognition. This review concludes by discussing the anticipated challenges in the future development of self-powered electronic skins based on triboelectric nanogenerators. This review holds practical significance for advancing the practical use of self-powered electronic skins based on triboelectric nanogenerators and offers valuable guidance for individuals interested in pursuing scientific and healthy endeavors.

As an emerging self-powered technology, triboelectric nanogenerators have the characteristics of a simple structure, high conversion efficiency, diverse material selection, and stable output. Hydrogels have the advantages of flexibility, extensibility, and shape adaptability, which means that hydrogel-based triboelectric nanogenerators (H-TENGs) have high flexibility, self-healing abilities, conductivity, and fatigue resistance. They can still operate normally in scenarios involving bending, pressing, stretching, and folding. H-TENGs offer a method of versatile and sustainable innovation in sports monitoring. This review elucidates the working principles and modes of H-TENGs, examines H-TENG characteristics that are relevant to intelligent sports, and summarizes their applications in this field. This paper concludes with a discussion on the development and applications of H-TENGs in intelligent sports.

The development of self-powered smart biosensors has attracted great attention due to their potential applications in human motion monitoring and energy collection systems. Here, a newly designed triboelectric nanogenerator (PSP-TENG) composed of the PU sponge, polytetrafluoroethylene, and polydimethylsiloxane for monitoring rear leg rotation motion in artistic gymnastics has been developed. The PSP-TENG can monitor the buffering and stretching time of rear leg rotation and identify the angle between the hip, knee, and ankle during the stretching stage. Furthermore, the PSP-TENG has the function of converting measured signals into power signals, which can convert collected human motion mechanical energy into electrical energy to power wearable devices. The development of PSP-TENG has made contributions to the field of human motion monitoring, providing ideas for new energy and technologies to improve the environment and promote a virtuous ecological cycle.