Energy Neutral Activity Monitoring: Wearables Powered by Smart Inductive Charging Surfaces

Wearable technologies play a key role in the shift of traditional healthcare services towards eHealth and self-monitoring. Maintenance overheads, such as regular battery recharging, impose a limitation on the applicability of such technologies in some groups of the population. In this paper, we propose an activity monitoring system that is based on wearable sensors that are powered by textile inductive charging surfaces. By strategically positioning these surfaces on pieces of furniture that are routinely used, the system passively charges the wearable sensor whilst the user is present. As a proof-of-concept example, experiments conducted on a prototype implementation of the system suggest that 36 minutes of daily desktop computer usage are on average sufficient to maintain a wearable sensor energy neutral.