A Self-Powered Wireless Health and Environment Monitoring System

The objective of our work is to develop a novel self-powered multi-modal wireless health monitoring sensory system architecture consisting of: (i) wearable devices to continuously monitor the vital signs of a person, and (ii) environmental sensory devices which can monitor the environment and also act as multi-hop routers providing data paths from the wearable devices to a main processing unit. Together these devices can provide effective remote health monitoring of a person and also inform the person of important information. In this paper, we address the significant issue of energy depletion for the devices, which can lead to critical interruptions in monitoring, by proposing a flexible unique vibration-based energy harvesting scheme to support our architecture. This active energy harvesting scheme will allow for continuous remote monitoring of the person and his/her environment in various situations. Experimental results demonstrate the potential utilization of electromagnetic and piezoelectric vibration-based harvesting techniques for the proposed application.