Wireless Charging of Smartwear for Health and Safety Monitoring System

Smart wearables for health monitoring have become an emerging technology that allows consumers to monitor and keep track of their health. However, as the number of sensors in a wearable device increases together with continuous monitoring and wireless communications, the battery lifetime and battery duration per charge becomes a major concern. This issue is particularly important for health monitoring of workers operating in difficult environments such as emergency response responders, mining and construction. In this paper, we present a wireless charging system for a health monitoring smart-wear application of workers by considering the power consumption requirements of sensory hardware, communication technology as well as the practical charging scenarios. We also demonstrate a working prototype of a 5-Watt wireless charging device used by our health monitoring wearable. Our paper provides the design, analysis of the requirements and the critical factors of a `wireless charging bin' that we are currently prototyping for our application context.

I. Introduction

Using smart wearable devices to monitor daily activities has become a major trend for consumers to keep track of their health and fitness. Smart-wear devices such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Xiaomi have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. For example, according to the International Data Corporation, the growth in the global wearables market during the second quarter of 2018 was up by 5.5% compared to 2017 with 27.9 million units sold [1]. Furthermore, according to Forbes, worldwide smart wearable device sales will double by 2022, becoming a $27 billion market with an expected 233 million units sold [2].