M08 Emerging Technologies | Is energy wearable?

Chair:
Michele Magno, ETHZ Zurich, CH

Wearable devices will be defined with reference to current applications. Their architecture and functionality will be described with particular emphasis on communication and energy aspects. Finally, design challenges will be presented with focus on mechanisms to guarantee energy sustainability.

As a wearable system is typically battery-powered and often autonomous, the analysis of the flow of power and energy in the system is at least as important as the evaluation of its functionality. Such an energy flow will include the generation, distribution, and storage of energy, and the functionality of the system can virtually be abstracted as a generic load consuming energy. The importance of an accurate evaluation of this energy flow is important because the devices it involves (energy scavengers, converters, inteconnections, and storage elements) do exhibit many non-idealities that, if not addressed properly, can totally offset the savings achieved by traditional energy-efficient techniques that act on system functionality. In this part of the tutorial we will overview these issues and suggest general strategies to address them in order
to optimize this potential tradeoff.

Chair:
Davide Quaglia, University of Verona, IT

The main challenge with wearables is how to provide enough energy for the sensors and electronics to run over a usable amount of time without increase the size of the device. This session of the tutorial focuses on all aspects of energy harvesting for wearable devices addressing production technologies and architectures, energy conversion and management, system design and integration. Special focus is given to solar, thermoelectric and kinetic energy harvesting systems and the will introduce the trend of emerging flexible technology allowing wearable body applications. The lecture will provide insight into the basic principles, potential and current applications of energy harvesting systems and it will be shown two practical example and prototypes of self-sustaining intelligent wearable devices with sensors.

Because of the increasing optimization needed in future wearable devices, the designer should jointly take into account aspects from different domains, such as digital (hardware, software, network) and analog (electronic, electromechanical, etc., as for instance RF, MEMS, power sources, thermal issues, sensors and actuators). Therefore the joint verification of such aspects requires new methodologies and tools for multi-disciplinary and multi-scale modeling and simulation. This presentation will start by providing a survey on modeling fundamentals and then it will focus on a novel approach for joint software-hardware-energy-network simulation which was proposed in recent European Projects.