Poster Abstract: A Human Body Power Transfer System to Enable Battery-Less Sensor Nodes

Abstract

New wearable technologies come with high requirements for miniaturization and flexibility, which are usually restricted by rigid batteries. Capacitive power transfer and communication, employing the human body as a conductive medium enables energy-efficient communication and even the possibility to achieve battery-less wearable sensors distributed on the body. This work presents as a proof-of-concept a complete system consisting of a custom-designed on-body transmitter and battery-less receiver and evaluates the power transmitted and the range achieved. We demonstrate the applicability of our prototype to a real-life scenario as a glucose level tracker even in realistic non-perfect grounding conditions. The realized design offers a power transmission of up to 2.5 mW at distances of 15 cm and at 125 cm, showing the possibility of battery-less on-body edge computing applications.