A biohybrid mesh harvester for distributed energy harvesting in living tissues

Harnessing bio-origin resources for energy conversion offers a promising pathway toward energy sustainability matched to biosystems, addressing a fundamental limitation in powering bio-integrated electronics. However, existing approaches by integrating harvesters onto continuous substrates follow a “centralized” paradigm that differs markedly from the inherently distributed energy conversion found in living tissues, limiting both biocompatibility and scalability. We demonstrate a distributed harvesting strategy by integrating individual harvesting units within a mesh network that closely mimics the structural and mechanical properties of biological tissues. This architecture enables seamless embedding within in vitro cardiac tissue to form a bio-hybridization with cellular-scale intimacy across both device and substrate, transcending conventional approaches limited to a surface contact. This strategy achieves effective energy density more than an order of magnitude higher than that of existing approaches based on the centralized paradigm. While the concept is currently demonstrated in an in vitro cardiac system for converting biomechanical energy, the approach can provide a generalizable framework for integrating diverse energy-harvesting modalities and offers a pathway toward in vivo biohybrid systems.