4th International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

A kinetic energy harvester with fast start-up for wearable body-monitoring sensors

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2010.8814,
        author={Jacopo Olivo and Davide Brunelli and Luca Benini},
        title={A kinetic energy harvester with fast start-up for wearable body-monitoring sensors},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2010},
        month={6},
        keywords={Batteries Biomedical monitoring Body area networks Humans Intelligent sensors Kinetic energy Sensor systems Supercapacitors Wearable sensors Wireless sensor networks},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2010.8814}
    }
    
  • Jacopo Olivo
    Davide Brunelli
    Luca Benini
    Year: 2010
    A kinetic energy harvester with fast start-up for wearable body-monitoring sensors
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2010.8814
Jacopo Olivo1,*, Davide Brunelli2,*, Luca Benini3,*
  • 1: Integrated Systems Laboratory, Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 2: Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
  • 3: Department of Electronics, Computer Sciences and Systems, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
*Contact email: jacopo.olivo@epfl.ch, davide.brunelli@disi.unitn.it, luca.benini@unibo.it

Abstract

A kinetic energy harvester for wearable wireless sensors and personal devices is proposed. The harvester is based on electromagnetic transduction of human movements and on a charge pump with smart switching to minimize the start-up time from the fully depleted state. A detailed analysis and design optimization in the frequency range typical of human motion is also presented. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach sharply reduces the start-up time and can exploit efficiently even small movements.