A Cable-Type Packaging for Voltage Regulation and Energy Transport in Wearable Energy Harvesting Systems

Energy harvesting (EH) technologies provide a promising solution for the self-power supply of wearable devices. However, it is challenging due to strict constraints of wearable systems in terms of size, weight, and cost. Additionally, a suitable method is required to transport the harvested energy from the environment or body to wearable devices. This letter proposes a cable-type packaging that embeds a converter into the connection wire to simultaneously regulate the voltage and transport the energy. A distributed inductor is implemented by winding the conductor in a helix around a flexible magnetic-sheet core to increase the inductance. This packaging method can aid the design of wearable EH systems and significantly reduce the size of the system. A prototype was fabricated based on the proposed packaging and compared with other two converters based on traditional packaging in terms of size, weight, and efficiency. The experimental results verify that the proposed packaging can reduce the system size by 75% and system weight by 35% under the same efficiency condition.