[2018] Energy Harvesting on the Body (MSc thesis project at Nowi)

About Nowi

The Nowi team is developing ‘Plug & Forget’ smart sensors. The bottleneck in achieving long-life sensors is the power supply. Nowi is developing energy harvesting and power management technology to solve this problem. The company was founded over 2 years ago, has grown to 12 people, received numerous innovation awards and has filed several patents. During this graduation assignment, you will have the opportunity to experience and contribute to a fast-moving tech start-up located in Delft.

www.nowi-energy.com

Background

The Internet of Things is becoming a reality and one very important application is on-body telemetry. Medical conditions can be measured to avoid immediate injuries during sports practice or prevent feature injuries. Since the telemetry is made by wireless sensors, energy is required to supply the sensors and at the same time the source of energy should not add to the volume of the sensor and give long energy autonomy. This scenario opens the possibility of energy harvesting usage in combination with the energy that is produced by the body during sports practice.

Assignment

Research questions that form the basis of this assignment:

What on-body energy source is more suitable to power the sensor?How much energy that can be harvested per part of the body?Does the part of the body that most energy can be harvested from have enough fluids or strong vital signals for sensing?How practical is it to place a sensor with energy harvesting at the best energy/fluids/signal trade-off location on the body?Contact

prof.dr.ir. Wouter Serdijn

Bioelectronics Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2019-04-14