Bootstrapping Health Wearables Powered by Intra-Body Power Transfer

Saad Ahmed, Eren Yildiz, Shashank Holla, Noor Mohammed, Bashima Islam, Kasim Sinan Yildirim, Jeremy Gummeson, Sunghoon Ivan Lee, Josiah D. Hester

Abstract: Continuous health monitoring is crucial to ensuring better health and taking preventive measures just-in-time. Existing battery-powered health wearables pose a significant limitation to continuous monitoring as batteries wear out after fixed energy cycles and need replacement. Ambient energy harvesting unlocks battery-free sensing but it suffers from spatio-temporal variability, making it unfit for health sensing. Intra-body power transfer (IBPT) provides an alternative energy source for battery-free operation, however, it can only provide limited energy in order to ensure wearer's safety. Existing system support is designed to maximize computational progress in a single energy cycle, thus wasting energy on computations that become stale in the next energy cycle. We instantiate an IBPT-powered health wearable capable of supporting multiple health sensors. To cope with lower incoming energy, we introduce BodyOS; a system support that exposes programming constructs for domain experts to express health applications in terms of the inherent dependencies of bio-signals being monitored by the application. By avoiding unnecessary sensing operations, BodyOS allows energy-efficient application execution and faster capacitor recharge while ensuring that the data sensed by the application is always useful. We evaluate BodyOS to show that it significantly improves energy efficiency, thus increasing the on-time and number of data points collected by the device.