Ubiquitous Self-Powered Architecture for Fuel Cell-Based Point-of-Care Applications

Current research about battery-less fuel cell-based point-of-care (POC) devices study energy extraction and the measurement separately. In this article, we purpose a self-powered architecture that extracts energy efficiently from a fuel cell and performs a measurement simultaneously. The prototype uses a discrete power management unit based architecture with a power consumption lower than 36 μW. We have tested it with ethanol, lactate, and methanol-based fuel cells, being able to perform a fuel concentration measurement while it extracts energy from fuel cells. The solution exhibited a minimum efficiency and maximum start-up time for the ethanol, lactate, and methanol-based fuel cells of 80% and 12 s. The architecture applies to other fuel cells, and the results show how this solution can help us face the current POC's autonomy challenge.