A strategy for human safety monitoring in high-temperature environments by 3D-printed heat-resistant TENG sensors

•A new strategy for 3D printing heat-resistant triboelectric nanogenerator sensors.•A multi-sensor collaborative body motion sensing network is successfully established.•Body motion tracking and recognition with the sensing network and smart algorithms. Flexible wearable devices based on triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) can be used to track many parameters around the human body, including signals from motions, gestures, and contacts, to perform a variety of tasks. However, it is still a challenge to achieve wide working temperature and multi-parameter body motion sensing with TENG sensors. To address that, this work reports a facile 3D printing-based strategy for preparing functionalized heat-resistant TENG sensors. In detail, a printable heat-resistant ink and multiple 3D printing-based assembly methods are proposed. The as-fabricated ink, which could maintain up to 200 ℃, then serves as multiple components in the TENG sensors through patterning. Functionalized TENG sensors and human–machine interfaces are printed and subsequently networked on a human body to sense comprehensive motion information. The results indicate six typical motions can be recognized with 94.85% accuracy based on neural network algorithms. A simple digital twin for motion capture and trace tracking in virtual space is furthermore implemented. Combining the proposed TENG sensors with virtual reality (VR) platforms opens up a new road for human safety monitoring in high-temperature environments.