Textile Antennas as Hybrid Energy-Harvesting Platforms

Smart-fabric interactive-textile systems offer exciting new possibilities, provided that they exhibit sufficient robustness and autonomy to be reliably deployed in critical applications. Textile multiantenna systems, unobtrusively integrated in a professional garment, are key components of such systems, as they set up energy-efficient and stable wireless body-centric communication links. Yet, their functionality may be further extended by exploiting their surface as energy-harvesting platform. Different state-of-the-art energy harvesters are suitable for compact integration onto a textile antenna. We demonstrate this by integrating a power management system, together with multiple diverse scavenging transducers and a storage module, on a well-chosen textile antenna topology. We provide guidelines to ensure that the additional hardware does not affect the textile antenna´s performance. Simultaneous scavenging from different energy sources significantly increases the autonomy of a wearable system, in the meanwhile reducing battery size.