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Power-over-Skin: Allowing Electricity to Travel Through the Body

Body-monitoring devices require batteries that are bulky and require regular maintenance. To free wearable tech from these burdens, researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed Power-over-Skin, which allows electricity to travel through the human body and could one day power battery-free devices from head to toe. Watch this video to learn more.

"We can expect all our electronics to keep improving," said Andy Kong  , part of the team that developed Power-over-Skin. "New releases, such as smartwatches and glasses, will be able to do so much more, but it will always be difficult to get electronics onto the body because people have to think about charging them. Power-over-Skin opens the door to making these devices invisible, allowing them to do their jobs without you noticing, which is how health monitoring should work."

Topics:
Electrification Electronics Energy Internet of Things Power RF & Microwave Electronics Wearables

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 modern Electronics enable tiny feature-rich Computing devices that can be easily worn on the body however batteries pose a major design and user experience obstacle they add weight and volume and generally require periodic device removal and recharging in response we developed power over skin which uses the human body itself to deliver power to many distributed

    00:00:19 battery-free worn devices using a single transmitter our worn receivers can Harvest body connected energy to power a wide range of applications for instance this pocket calculator we instrumented with our receiver board demonstrates input output and computation we envision users wearing a single transmitter potentially

    00:00:42 integrated into existing device categories such as XR headsets to power entire fleet of on bodybody devices our technique also works through clothing and this can even be integrated into a phone and coupled to the body through the pocket we ran a series of studies to quantify the performance of our approach and found we could deliver out to 61 microwatts of power from head to toe and

    00:01:03 up to, 1500 microwatts of power for closer Arrangements of transmitter and receiver such as wrist to fingertip using this power budget we created a set of proof of concept applications starting simple we can charge and discharge a capacitor to Blink an LED integrated into a piece of jewelry however much more versatile is to power a microprocessor with digital

    00:01:22 analog IO as well as the ability to drive displays and actuators and communicate wirelessly for example we built this ring controller allowing users to control it interface over Bluetooth using a miniature joystick our technique can also power small screens such as this eink display which shows sun exposure and finally longitudinal

    00:01:48 biometric monitoring becomes immediately practical such as this body temperature sensor that logs the readings to the cloud every 10 minutes please see our paper for full implementation and experimental details but