AHs 2025 texTENG: Fabricating Wearable Textile-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerators

What if your clothes could power your wearable devices? texTENG introduces a maker-friendly framework for creating textile-based triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs)—fabrics that harvest energy from everyday human motion like walking, arm swings, or even breathing. While TENGs have shown promise for sustainable wearable power, adoption has been slow due to hard-to-find materials and complex fabrication. texTENG solves this with accessible techniques using common textiles and conductive threads that makers can replicate. The system demonstrates versatile applications: from self-powered touch sensors that detect gestures without batteries, to energy-harvesting patches that can charge small devices. Technical evaluations confirm the devices can reliably detect touch input and store harvested energy efficiently. This work opens the door for HCI researchers and makers to explore battery-free wearable computing.

Ritik Batra, Narjes Pourjafarian, Samantha Chang, Margaret Tsai, Jacob Revelo, and Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao. 2025. texTENG: Fabricating Wearable Textile-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerators. In Augmented Humans International Conference 2025 (AHs '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745900.3746071