Body-coupled wireless power transfer and energy harvesting for wearables

Abstract

With the growing number of wearables, providing power to the wearables around the body is becoming challenging. Using batteries for each node is inconvenient due to charging overhead. RF-based wireless power transfer (WPT) is limited by the human-body shadowing effect. Many energy harvesting (EH) methods such as PV/tribo/piezoelectric/thermoelectric harvesters have their own limitations when it comes to the wearables. This paper introduces the human body-coupled wireless power transfer/energy harvesting, namely the Body-Coupled Powering (BCP), which overcomes the issues with conventional RF-WPT or EH methods.