Energy Scavenging Methods for WBAN Applications: A Review

Recently, energy scavenging studies have become an important research area not only for the utilization of ambient energy sources but also for their high potential to replace the batteries especially for wireless body area networks (WBANs). Conventionally, batteries are used to provide energy to the WBANs. Amount of energy provided by batteries limits on-board features and communication range of the WBANs. Also, battery recharging or replacement is significantly impractical. Therefore, different energy scavenging interface circuits with different efficiencies have been proposed to overcome these limitations. This study focuses on energy scavengers and their potential utilization for low-power systems. Particularly, energy scavenging interface circuits for the WBANs are investigated in this paper.