Wearable sensors based on piezoelectric ceramics for sports monitoring: Advances in material engineering

Wearable piezoelectric sensors are increasingly attractive for sports monitoring because they can transduce dynamic deformation into self-generated electrical signals while maintaining high temporal resolution for impacts, joint motion, plantar loading, and selected physiological vibrations. However, the practical translation of piezoelectric ceramics into sports wearables is still constrained by three coupled bottlenecks: the performance gap between lead-free and lead-based materials under realistic processing windows, the mechanical and dielectric mismatch between rigid ceramics and compliant substrates, and the limited maturity of device-level validation under athlete-specific operating conditions. Four analytical axes are particularly useful for evaluating the field: material chemistry, composite architecture, sensing target, and validation maturity. Representative PZT, BaTiO 3 , KNN, and BNT-based systems can be benchmarked using piezoelectric and thermal metrics together with reproducibility, scalability, and wearable relevance; ceramic-polymer connectivity and interface engineering can be compared from a trade-off perspective; conventional and additive fabrication routes can be assessed using defect, cost, and manufacturability criteria; and application reports can be judged through explicit validation metrics rather than qualitative claims alone. Available evidence shows that lead-free systems have narrowed the gap to PZT in several targeted use cases, but their deployment in sports wearables still depends on tighter process control, more reliable encapsulation, and better calibration pipelines. These trends support design rules for material selection, device architecture, manufacturing, signal conditioning, and durability testing that can guide the next generation of robust piezoelectric sports-monitoring platforms.