Pasteables: A Flexible, Stick-and-Peel Smart Sensing Platform for Edge Applications

Reiner N. Dizon-Paradis, Aritra Dasgupta, Rohan Reddy Kalavakonda, Swarup Bhunia

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of wireless sensing and edge computing. The diverse usage of IoT has resulted in a wide variety of device implementations, which motivated the development of flexible plug-and-play architectures for edge devices. Many of the existing architectures lack self-organizing behavior that helps the energy efficiency of edge IoT devices and improves the network congestion and traffic of a group of edge devices. In this paper, we propose a collaborative, modular, and reconfigurable edge device with a stick-and-peel usage model, which is called the “Pasteable” platform. Pasteable devices, similar to the band-aids, can be “pasted” on virtually any surface, including the human body, for diverse sensing needs. This platform can be configured to have various combinations of sensors and offers multiple power mode configurations that support both static operation and battery-aware dynamic control. We present a flexible architecture of pasteables in order to speed up the design, manufacturing, and testing of these modular components. We have built functioning prototypes of pasteables and studied their efficacy for multiple practical use cases, including light sensing (for monitoring light pollution) and athletic performance tracking.