Kinetic energy powered computing - an experimental feasibility study

Abstract

Kinetic energy is an attractive energy source for lowpower wearable systems. Several kinetic energy micro generatorshave already been modeled and fabricated. However,they have not been evaluated in the context of typicalwearable computing scenarios. This paper presents an experimentalapproach towards such an evaluation. For theevaluation, acceleration measurements were performed onseveral human test subjects while walking on a treadmill.Acceleration was measured and recorded at different pointsof the body. Subsequently, the amount of available outputpower was calculated based on a simple mechanical model.Based on the measured waveforms the upper limit of theoutput power is estimated to be around 200 µW dependingon the mounting position of the generator on the humanbody.