Energy management policy for fitness gadgets: A case study of human daily routines

Abstract

The idea of employing scavenged power from human daily routines to run electronic devices are attracting increased attention of many researchers worldwide. However, there is still limited knowledge of energy characteristics generated by human motions. Moreover, level of human activities vary during a day from sitting for several hours to running on a treadmill. This highlights a vital need for energy management strategies. Hence, in this paper, we analyse more than 200 hours of day-scale human activities collected from 5 participants in 25 days. We divide energy generated by human daily routines into mild and intense activities. Subsequently, we develop an energy management policy which estimates required time for a device to store needed power between each active interval. We also evaluate the validity of our model using real world data. The results present an understanding towards a design of energy harvesting fitness gadgets.