GlassTENG: Self-Powered Triboelectric Nanogenerator based Sensing of Pulse, Jaw, and Upper Facial Activity from Everyday Glasses

Raj N. Dave, Jovanis Prodanich, Yung-ching Lai, Oscar Jakacki, Stanley Lin, Jack Thoene, Nabil Alshurafa, Nivedita Arora

Smart glasses maintain near-continuous skin contact at multiple arterial and muscular sites, making them a promising platform for physiological sensing. In practice, though, two factors make sustained daily wear and longitudinal deployment impractical for the quantified self: the discomfort of prolonged sensor-skin contact (e.g., gels and adhesives) and the sensor power demands that increase battery size, weight, and maintenance burden. We present GlassTENG, an ultra-low-power sensor that embeds three custom-fabricated triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) into a glasses frame at the angular artery on the nasal bridge, the superficial temporal artery on an extended arm, and the temporalis muscle at the temple. Each GlassTENG sensor is self-powered in transducing mechanical energy to electrical energy and consumes 1.36 $μ$W per sensor at the analog front-end. GlassTENG enables simultaneous capture of arterial pulse waveforms, jaw kinematics (e.g., clenching, tapping, eating), and upper facial activity (e.g., blinking, eyebrow movement). In a 20-participant user study, we achieve 93.8% accuracy across six jaw and upper facial activities and estimate heart rate with a mean absolute error of 1.82 beats per minute (BPM) relative to a ground-truth chest-strap sensor in 30s windows. Together, these results establish a future pathway toward a longitudinally worn, ultra-low-power, glasses-based physiological monitoring platform.