Progress in TENG technology—A journey from energy harvesting to nanoenergy and nanosystem

Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) technology is a promising research field for energy harvesting and nanoenergy and nanosystem (NENS) in the aspect of mechanical, electrical, optical, acoustic, fluidic, and so on. This review systemat-ically reports the progress of TENG technology, in terms of energy-boosting, emerging materials, self-powered sensors, NENS, and its further integration with other potential technologies. Starting from TENG mechanisms including the ways of charge generation and energy-boosting, we introduce the applications from energy harvesters to various kinds of self-powered sensors, that is, physical sensors, chemical/gas sensors. After that, further applications in NENS are dis-cussed, such as blue energy, human-machine interfaces (HMIs), neural inter-faces/implanted devices, and optical interface/wearable photonics. Moving to new research directions beyond TENG, we depict hybrid energy harvesting tech-nologies, dielectric-elastomer-enhancement, self-healing, shape-adaptive capa-bility, and self-sustained NENS and/or internet of things (IoT). Finally, the outlooks and conclusions about future development trends of TENG technologies are discussed toward multifunctional and intelligent systems.