Touchpower: Interaction-Based Power Transfer for Power-as-Needed Devices

The trend toward ubiquitous deployment of electronic devices demands novel low maintenance power schemes to alleviate the burden of maintaining such a large number of devices. In our paper [14], we propose Interaction-based Power Transfer (IPT): a novel power scheme for power-as-needed devices (i.e., devices that only require power during interaction). IPT allows for the removal of built-in batteries on such devices, and enables them to instead be powered up through direct contact interaction with the user (e.g. gripping a mouse, holding a pen). We prove the concept and show the potential of IPT through our TouchPower prototype. TouchPower transfers on-body power to off-body power-as-needed devices through contact between electrodes on a glove worn by the user and those on the target device during the interaction. Evaluation results show that during interaction, TouchPower is able to provide stable power supply to these devices with only a small sacrifice with regard to interaction naturalness.

期刊文章