Title: Autonomous Wearable Computing using Ambient RF Energy Harvesting
Abstract:
With the Internet of Things market exponential growth, great interest has arisen in power-autonomous computing at the network edge. Wearable electronics, a key emerging sector of the IoT market, impose additional design constraints such as ease of integration in wearable materials, and virtually infinite lifetime. Ambient Radio-Frequency power represents a reliable source for energy harvesting, utilising existing communication infrastructure. However, factors such as path losses, RF to DC conversion inefficiency and commercial Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMIC) imperfections have hindered the materialisation of integrated RF powered nodes. A system-oriented design approach, starting with textile antenna designs for RFEH and reconfigurable high efficiency rectifier is proposed towards realising a wirelessly-powered edge-computing system, integrated on-textile, for next generation pervasive wearable computing.