Development of Zero Powered Human Detection Sensor Using Environmental Electric Noise

Abstract

This study proposes a novel human detection sensor that works without any form of power supply. The proposed sensor is based on an energy harvesting technique and consists of an antenna and a rectification circuit of a Cockcroft-Walton multiplier. From the fact that a human body is dielectric and couples with a close antenna, the strength of the environmental noise captured by the antenna and the output of the sensor change according to the distance between the sensor and the body. This paper reports the results of some experiments that explores the parameters of the sensor under several conditions and show its feasibility as well as an example application. As a result, the proposed human detection sensor is confirmed to be quite promising to achieve a sensor node that reports the presence of a person to an external system through wireless communication and works without a battery.