Thursday, November 7, 2013

Powering bio-electronics in the future


It has always worried me, what is the future of portable bio-integrated electronics, if the battery technology is nowhere near to what is required for these bio-compatible applications? Just to name a few areas I see prominent in not-so-far future are sensors: temperature, humidity, pressure etc. Pioneering work is being presently done by J. Rogers et al. in this area and I am fascinated about it. Power and battery issues were always a reason I was a bit skeptical about the future applications. But, now things seem to be changing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8165928.stm
But today I found a possible solution to my fundamental problem of providing power to the bioelectronic devices. A technology called Cota, which is being developed by Ossia Inc., offers a wireless power solution. Forget the need for battery, just put some supercapacitor to provide power when offline from wireless power!

Essentially, the idea is to provided directed microwave power to power up electronic equipment and devices. I speculate the microwave transmitter works on the phased array antennas, how else can it work without any moving parts involved?

And the idea fundamentally sounds realistic, it is claimed to be able to transmit roughly 1 W of power, which is more than enough to charge up the cell phone (it often uses 2-3 W when charging, but some quicker chargers use 10 W = 5V * 2A). For those who are concerned about safety, remember that when you talk on your cell phone, roughly 2 W of peak power are transmitted.


 

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