Functional Polymer Nanocomposites as Supercapacitors for Health Care

 In the recent past, supercapacitors for powering health monitoring bioelectronics have gained tremendous attention of the researchers from various fields. Energy storage devices for bioelectronics require combination of biocompatibility, stretchability and self-charging characteristics. Polymer nanocomposite based supercapacitors possess immense potential due to excellent set of properties such as flexibility, high specific capacitance, enhanced energy and power densities and tissue-conforming abilities. Health monitoring device is generally composed of three major units such as sensing, data transmittance and power unit. The function of the sensing unit is to sense various input data such as blood pressure, body temperature, pulse rate, glucose level, etc. After the sensing, the data are converted to the electrical signals as output followed by processing and transmitting to other devices for analysis and interpretation. All these process require an efficient powering. Hence, the low power wearable devices demand independent source of energy. Polymer nanocomposites are utilized in the health care applications such as wearable gadgets, biosensors, implantable biomedical devices, etc. Bioelectronics powered with polymer nanocomposite based supercapacitors emerging as the non-touching wearables, skin conforming wearables, skin touching wearables and implant applications. Smart wearable electronics are designed by integrating the flexible type solid-state supercapacitors with the textiles or wearable devices. Asymmetric supercapacitors are combined with solar cell and piezoelectric generators to produce self-powered energy devices. Extensive research is going on to fabricate biocompatible supercapacitors by designing various functional polymer nanocomposites which could be utilized as powering devices in implants to address the issue of frequent battery replacement. In this chapter, we will discuss briefly about the important attributes and recent progress in the functional polymer nanocomposite based supercapacitors as the emerging powering units in the healthcare devices.