Towards battery-free LPWAN wearables

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is an emerging technology in IoT which is utilized in use cases like smart cities and smart agriculture. LPWAN offers new features to wearable systems and therefore introduces new application scenarios. Long range communication is already used in application scenariosm such as elderly monitoring, localization, sportsm etc. We demonstrate how LPWAN wearables can operate by using energy-harvesting means and be battery-free. This preliminary study with real experiments illustrates how the LoRa radio is able to operate by a combination of solar and mechanical energy on a smart shoe prototype outdoors. The results indicate that the activity can influence the harvest rate.