Adaptive Maximization of Harvested Kinetic Energy for Small Wearable Medical Sensors

Energy harvesting (EH) is the process of capturing and storing energy from external sources or the ambient environment. The EH devices have found various emerging applications, particularly, in healthcare sector. Kinetic-based micro energy-harvesting is a promising technology that could prolong the lifetime of batteries in small wearable or implantable devices. In this paper, using a mathematical model of a Coulomb-force parametric generator, we analyze the dependency of the output power on the electrostatic force in this micro-harvester. We propose a very low complexity strategy to adaptively change the electrostatic force in order to maximize the harvested power. Simulation results using the human acceleration measurements confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.