Modeling & Characterization of Harvestable Kinetic Energy for Wearable Medical Sensors

RF-enabled wearable and implantable wireless sensors are fast becoming a promising interdisciplinary research area in pervasive health information technology.  These sensors offer an attractive set of e-health applications, including medical and physiological monitoring (e.g. temperature, respiration, heart rate, blood pressure). Due to their small size, such sensors might have a very limited battery-enabled power supply.  As frequent recharge or even sensor replacement is not a practical solution for all applications, energy harvesting can be used as a technology to prolong the battery lifetime of these sensors.  Exploiting such auxiliary source of energy could directly impact the everyday use of sensors and significantly help their commercial applications in remote monitoring of physiological signals (i.e. telemedicine). In this project, NIST intends to study the statistical characteristics of the harvestable kinetic energy generated from the human motion. This knowledge could help researchers to design efficient energy management protocols for low-power wearable medical sensors.