Poster Abstract: KinetiSee - A Perpetual Wearable Camera Acquisition System with a Kinetic Harvester

Abstract

Wearable devices are massively entering in our life and they are more and more pushing the interest big electronic producer. Then, today many company are offering wearable "smart" objects to be worn which enable a wide range of application (form sport & fitness, to entrainment, from tracking to health care). A common issue of wearable device that is reducing the appeal of them is the limited lifetime due to limited energy that can be stored in them batteries. Self-sustainable devices which can avoid to recharge or replace the batteries, as it happens in automatic quartz watches, is still a dream for wearable devices. This paper presents a wearable device with an ultra low camera, which can achieve this dream. To achieve this goal, the Wearable camera has been carefully designed with low power consumption in mind and leveraging a kinetic energy harvester to scavenge energy from the human body movements. The experimental results shows the impressive amount of energy (up to 9.6mJ per minute) that can be acquired during different human activities (running, walking, etc) and the self- sustainability of the solution acquiring up to more than 2000 images for hour when is running.