Why Wear a Battery? The Future of Wearables May be Batteryless

Wearable devices are very promising for addressing a range of urgent needs in health and eldercare, safety, activity tracking, wellbeing, entertainment, and myriad other applications. By continuously sensing and analyzing data these platforms have also enabled a broad set of research paths in these same domains. Despite this wide usage, the current state of wearables has not yet met the vision that many hold, of unobtrusive devices that support our life and well-being in perpetuity without maintenance; finally realizing Weiser's vision of invisible computing, where a person no longer need to manage or maintain personal devices. This next step in wearable technology requires re-imagining fundamental building blocks and assumptions held on what a wearable can do. Many challenges exist, including security and privacy, usability, social stigma and pressure, and of course, energy. In this talk we focus on the problem of energy and device lifetime in wearable devices and contemplate what the requirements are to realize wearables that are truly maintenance free and last for decades. We first discuss early efforts to sustain long battery lifetimes on commodity hardware devices. We then question the role of batteries and build on recent work showing that energy harvesting and battery-free operation offer a tantalizing path towards a new generation of wearable computing. This talk will end with a discussion of the real challenges in realizing ubiquitous computing with battery-free wearables, the potential research paths, and the exciting applications we can begin to tackle.