Advanced Energy Harvesters and Energy Storage for Powering Wearable and Implantable Medical Devices.

Wearable and Implantable Active Medical Devices (WIMDs) are transformative solutions for improving healthcare, offering continuous health monitoring, early disease detection, targeted treatments, personalized medicine, and connected health capabilities. Commercialized WIMDs use primary or rechargeable batteries to power their sensing, actuation, stimulation, and communication functions, and periodic battery replacements of implanted active medical devices pose major risks of surgical infections or inconvenience to users. Addressing the energy source challenge is critical for meeting the growing demand of the WIMD market that is reaching valuations in the tens of billions of dollars. This review presents a critical assessment of recent advances in energy harvesting and storage technologies that can potentially eliminate the need for battery replacements. With a key focus on advanced materials that can close the gaps between WIMDs' energy needs and the energy that can harnessed by energy harvesters, this review examines the crucial roles of advanced materials in improving the efficiencies of energy harvesters, wireless charging, and energy storage devices. This review concludes by highlighting the key challenges and opportunities in advanced materials necessary to achieve the vision of wearable and implantable active medical devices that are self-powered, eliminating the risks associated with surgical battery replacement and the inconvenience of frequent manual recharging. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.