Energy-Harvesting Wearables for Activity-Aware Services

Recent advancements in energy-harvesting hardware have created an opportunity for realizing batteryless wearables for continuous and pervasive human activity recognition (HAR). Unfortunately, power consumption of accelerometers used in conventional HAR is relatively high compared to the amount of power that can be harvested practically, which limits the usefulness of energy harvesting. Here, the authors present and evaluate a novel energy-harvesting wearable sensor architecture, HAR from Kinetic Energy (HARKE), that doesn´t require using an accelerometer. Using off-the-shelf products, the authors demonstrate that the voltage of a kinetic harvester exhibits distinguishable patterns to distinctly infer human activities. Their results demonstrate that HARKE is as accurate as an accelerometer-based HAR system, yet consumes only a small fraction of the limited harvested energy.