Power-over-Skin: Full-Body Wearables Powered By Intra-Body RF Energy

Powerful computing devices are now small enough to be easily worn on the body. However, batteries pose a major design and user experience obstacle, adding weight and volume, and generally requiring periodic device removal and recharging. In response, we developed Power-over-Skin, an approach using the human body itself to deliver power to many distributed, battery-free, worn devices. We demonstrate power delivery from on-body distances as far as from head-to-toe, with sufficient energy to power microcontrollers capable of sensing and wireless communication. We share results from a study campaign that informed our implementation, as well as experiments that validate our final system. We conclude with several demonstration devices, ranging from input controllers to longitudinal bio-sensors, which highlight the efficacy and potential of our approach.

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Andy Kong, Daehwa Kim, and Chris Harrison. 2024. Power-over-Skin: Full-Body Wearables Powered By Intra-Body RF Energy. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 1–13.

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Power-over-Skin: Full-Body Wearables Powered By Intra-Body RF Energy Powerful computing devices are now small enough to be easily worn on the body. However, batteries pose a major design and user experience obstacle, adding weight and volume, and generally requiring periodic device removal and recharging. In response, we developed Power-over-Skin, an approach using the human body itself to deliver power to many distributed, battery-free, worn devices. We demonstrate power delivery from on-body distances as far as from head-to-toe, with sufficient energy to power microcontrollers capable of sensing and wireless communication. We share results from a study campaign that informed our implementation, as well as experiments that validate our final system. We conclude with several demonstration devices, ranging from input controllers to longitudinal bio-sensors, which highlight the efficacy and potential of our approach. Download Paper PDF Reference Andy Kong, Daehwa Kim, and Chris Harrison. 2024. Power-over-Skin: Full-Body Wearables Powered By Intra-Body RF Energy. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 1–13.
© Chris Harrison