Wearable thermoelectric generators as energy harvesters for wireless body sensors
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Wearable thermoelectric generators as energy harvesters for wireless body sensors Alaa Attar1 · Faisal Albatati1 Received: 13 June 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 © Islamic Azad University 2020
Abstract Wireless body sensor networks are becoming a ubiquitous solution to preventing chronic illnesses for a population with an ever-increasing number of elderly people. Through constant and real-time health monitoring, caregivers and medical personnel, and even patients themselves, can act more quickly in the event of a critical situation. The design of wireless body sensors must have several characteristics that enable their integration into the wearer’s life as seamlessly and unobtrusively as possible. Thus, how these sensors are powered becomes a topic of interest. Much research and work have been conducted on using thermoelectric generators to convert the waste heat from human metabolic activities into useful electricity to perpetually power these devices. The concept of an effective wireless body sensor network is also studied in this work. Analytical approaches are applied to a commercial module as an energy-scavenging device based on data gathered from a wide literature review. The ideal model is further optimized using a dimensionless approach to determine the feasibility of the optimized device in terms of implementation and performance. Finally, a design that considers all parameters of an effective energyscavenging device is proposed alongside work for the future. Keywords Wearable thermoelectric · Low grade thermoelectric generator · Design of thermoelectric generator system
Introduction The wearable technology has received increased attention over the past years from both the industrial community as well as academia with the goal of developing low-cost, energy autonomous, highly efficient, and maintenance-free solutions. The main challenge facing wearable devices is the limitation of their battery lifetime. The rapid development of the technology shifted the research interest from extending the lifetime of batteries to the development of power generators that are able to harvest energy from environmental sources and convert them into useful electricity to power the wearable devices. Energy can be harvested from different sources such as sunlight through photovoltaic, natural body heat using thermoelectric generators (TEGs), radio frequency, body movement and many other sources. Consequently, energy harvesting became the primary technology for wearable devices in various applications. Although most
* Alaa Attar [email protected] 1
wearable devices available nowadays, are solar PV powered because of its high-energy output, TEG-powered wearables have the advantage of the dependency on body heat without relying on an external source, which makes it an attractive solution to power wearable devices. From this view, an extensive research has been conducted on using TEGs to convert metabolic activities to useful electricity to power wearable devices.
Background Today’s advancements in t
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