SolAR: Energy Positive Human Activity Recognition using Solar Cells

The high power consumption of inertial activity sensors limits the battery lifetime of today’s wearable devices. Recent studies promise to extend the lifetime of wearable devices by translating kinetic energy from human movements into electrical energy while using the harvesting signal to replace conventional activity sensors. However, in human-centric applications, the amount of harvested kinetic energy is not enough to power a real-time activity recognition algorithm and run the wearable device perpetually. In this paper, we propose Solar based human Activity Recognition (SolAR), which uses solar cells simultaneously as an activity sensor as well as an energy source. Our key observation is that the power available from a wrist-worn solar cell changes dynamically while a person moves, encoding information about the underlying activity. We collect empirical solar energy data to explore its activity sensing potential and implement the activity recognition pipeline on an ultra low-power micro-controller unit to evaluate the end-to-end power consumption of the system. Our analysis reveals that SolAR improves activity recognition accuracy by up to 8.3% and harvests more than one order of magnitude higher power compared to its kinetic counterpart. This enables SolAR to generate more energy than required for the entire activity recognition pipeline, which we term as energy positive activity recognition, achieving uninterrupted, autonomous, self-powered and real-time operation.