Powering Smart Wearable Systems with Flexible
Solar Energy Harvesting
Petar Jokic°, Michele Magno°*
° Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, firstname.lastname@ee.ethz.ch
* DEI, University of Bologna, Italy, michele.magno@unibo.it
Abstract—Recent advances in electrical sensing and flexible
devices have demonstrated great potential in a wide range of
applications including wearable devices for fitness and health care.
Flexible plastic substrates, such as polyimide, or transparent
conductive polyester are used to fabricate flexible devices that
increase the comfort when they are worn by users or patients.
However, one challenge that still limits the success of wearable
devices is the limited lifetime especially in biomedical applications.
Energy harvesting technology is one of the most promising
approaches to address the short lifetime of wearable devices.
However, harvesting energy for powering wearable devices is
more challenging due to strict constraints in terms of size, weight
and cost. In this work, we present the design of a wearable smart
bracelet that uses thin-film small form factor flexible photovoltaic
panels as energy source. The solar energy harvesting subsystem
has been designed to maximize the energy conversion efficiency
(up to 90%) to achieve a self-sustainable wireless wearable system.
The full-system integration has been developed and assembled
using polyamide film to realize a fully flexible smart bracelet for
long term monitoring of patients or elderly people in healthcare
applications. Preliminary in-field experiments show that a single
flexible solar panel can harvest up to 16mW of power in outdoor
and 0.21mW in indoor scenarios. We demonstrate that, the
developed device, combining low power design and flexible energy
harvesting, achieves perpetual work, acquiring one blood
oxygenation measurement per minute and sending data via
Bluetooth.
Keywords—Ultra-low power device, wearable devices, e-health,
energy harvesting, flexible electronics, long term monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
Wearable sensing devices in form of smart watches, fitness
and health tracking bracelets have become omnipresent in our
society. The fast development in this sector regularly brings new
applications on the market, which follow the trend of
miniaturization but also feature a growing range of monitoring
applications. Flexible and printable technologies are helping this
trend increasing wearer comfort and further reducing the form
factor of wearable devices [1][2].
Extended lifetime is an important selling factor for wearable
devices and indispensable for long-term monitoring
applications. There are two fundamental approaches to extend
the lifetime of a wearable device: reducing power consumption
or by increasing energy storage capacity. Designing wearable
systems around state-of the art low-power components is the
natural solution when reducing the power consumption. In
addition, smart and adaptive systems that can reduce the
overhead of data acquisition, processing and transmission can
further reduce the overall power consumption of the system.
978-1-4673-6853-7/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Although, there are different battery types which have
specific energy densities, it is a simple fact that the size of a
battery correlates with its capacity and the size-requirements of
a wearable system directly limit the maximum possible storage
capacity of the device. While there are technological
improvements in storage capacity, leakage current of storage
devices, these trail far behind the demand by emerging wearable
applications. As a result, there are many wearable devices,
which last only few hours.
Energy harvesting is the principle of extracting energy from
the environment and converting it into an electric form, which
can be used to power a device and charge its battery [3]. The
most commonly used sources are solar energy and thermal
energy as they provide the highest power per area [1], which is
an important factor in such size-limited devices. Other sources
for energy harvesting include the kinetic energy from the
movements of the wearer or the energy from radio signals used
for communication with a base station. An important
development in energy harvesting for wearable devices has
come from the flexible technology providing photovoltaic
panels in a form factor suitable for wearables[4] that could
enable self-sustaining devices worn on the human body.
In this paper, we evaluate the possibility to supply a flexible
bracelet with a novel flexible solar energy harvester. We design
the whole system combining low-power technologies and
techniques with highly-efficient energy-harvesting circuits. The
final goal is to realize a self-sustaining system for long term
monitoring applications that could for example be used in the
biomedical field. The system we have developed demonstrates
that solar energy harvesting is ready to perpetually supply
wearable devices to measure oxygenation level once a minute.
The paper is organized as follows: Section II describes
related works in the field. Section III introduces the solar energy
harvesting, and Section IV describes the system architecture of
the flexible bracelet, while Section V shows in-field
experimental results. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper.
II. RELATED WORK
Wearable devices and their applications have recently
attracted much research attention. Due to the interest of
commercial entities developing wearable consumer electronic
products, wireless sensor devices attached in different ways to
the human body have become successful products in the
wellness, fashion and sports domains, with many applications
interfaced directly via smartphones [5].
As these devices are designed to be worn on the human body
for longer periods (i.e. for days, or more), they cannot be
supplied or recharged with energy from a wall socket during use.
For this reason, using Energy Harvesting (EH) to harvest energy
from ambient environmental sources, movement or heat is
particularly attractive to achieve self-sustaining systems [3][6]-
[10]. Wearable devices are, however, extremely constrained in
terms of size and space, and depending on the application must
also couple with the body bringing additional restrictions on
their placement. This also limits the possibilities of the wearable
EH systems to access available energy sources.
The most promising sources of energy for harvesting on and
near the body include thermal, vibration, light and RF. Out of
these sources the least appealing is RF, as within the small form
factors available for wearable systems it has be shown to provide
only a few nanoWatts [8]. Thermal electric generators present
an interesting EH solution, and have been proposed in several
previous works [7]. The main idea is extracting energy from the
difference of human temperature and ambient temperature.
Previous works show that this is a concrete option to
continuously extract energy from the human body, although the
available power remains is in the range of a few μWs. Vibration
resulting from movement presents another interesting source for
EH. There are two primary families, either using piezoelectric or
micro-electromagnetic generators. Many solutions are large in
size, for example requiring a backpack or large mechanisms
attached to the legs to harvest energy during motion. On the
smaller scale kinetic energy harvester presented by Seiko for
autonomous watches [9][10] is a solution that would fit on a
wristband. EH using light energy as an environmental source is
a mature technology that has been in use for decades. The main
challenges for wearable EH are: for long periods the wearable
device may be indoors where the source is artificial light; the
photovoltaic (PV) panels must be very small in size; and, there
is the problem of occlusions occurring due to clothing that can
significantly limit the energy intake [1]. Nevertheless, recent
work has shown that light is still one of the best EH sources
when occlusions do not occur.
In this work, we focus on light EH that use flexible
photovoltaic panel as main transducer [4]. Moreover, we build a
complete system using flexible PCB and flexible solar panel to
demonstrate that it is possible achieve a self-suitable wearable
wireless device when low-power design is combined with
energy harvesting.
III. SOLAR ENERGY HARVESTING
Solar energy can be harvested using photovoltaic panels,
which are made from specialized semiconductor material, being
exposed to light. Satellites, houses but also commercial power
plants implement this technology to convert the energy from the
ambient light into an electrical voltage. Although the theoretical
efficiency is rather low at 40% (when using nanocrystal cells)
[11] and levels currently achieved are even lower [6], they have
the advantage that this source is readily available every day for
wearable applications for humans. There are essentially three
different types of solar cells [6]:1) Amorphous cells: mostly
used for indoor applications due to a low natural light sensitivity
(low price range, efficiency of only 5%). 2) Monocrystalline
cells: used for indoor and outdoor applications due to a wide
spectral sensitivity (high price, efficiency of 22%). 3)
Polycrystalline cells: used for outdoor applications (medium
price range, efficiency of 13-15%). From a wearable application
point of view, the output power, the effective light spectrum and
the size as well as the flexibility of the cells are of special
interest. Table I shows a selection of small solar cells intended
for wearable applications available on the market.
TABLE I. Comparison of commercial solar cells intended for wearable
applications
Characteristics
Type Short Circuit
Open Voltage [V] Size[mm]
current [mA]
IXYS: KXOB22- 6.2 x 10 x 1.75
12X1F [12]
0.63 50
(rigid)
FlexSolarCells: 12.7 x 64 x 0.2
4.5 10.7
SP3-12 [4] (flexible)
Sphelar: KSP- 24 x 9.5 x 5.1
3.64 4.7
F12 [13] (rigid)
The characteristics are usually given under ”AM1.5”
conditions, which translates to a solar power of 1000W/m2
(direct sunlight illumination) and at a temperature of 25۬C [4].
In order to extract the maximum possible energy from this
source, the solar cell has to be operated at the Maximum Power
Point (MPP). While the open circuit voltage and the short circuit
current can easily be determined, the point at which the power
reaches its maximum is harder to be found. As a rule of thumb
the MPP can be expected to be at a voltage of about 80% of the
open circuit voltage, as presented in state of the art solar energy
harvesting circuits [3]. Fig. 1 shows the typical output
characteristic of a solar cell. Since this curve changes with the
incident illumination and other environmental factors, the MPP
has to be tracked and adapted continuously. Today many ICs
include a so called Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT)
algorithm directly on chip to improve the integration and the
energy efficiency significantly [3].
From commercially available solar cells intended for
wearable applications, the only flexible one that has size suitable
for a flexible bracelet and performance similar to the rigid panels
is the Flex Solar Cells [4] and this has been selected as main
transducer.
Fig. 1. Output characteristic of PowerFilm SP3-12 solar cell (measured
during illumination of 5000lux).
IV. FLEXIBLE BRACELET
The block diagram in Fig. 2 shows the designed flexible
bracelet that is optimized for long-term acquisition of bio-sensor
data. There are three main blocks: flexi-bracelet that includes the
energy harvesting and the power management circuits, the radio
and the microcontroller. As described in the previous section the
flexible solar panel is a Flex Solar Cells: SP3-12 [4] and it is
placed on top of a sensors expansion board that includes on-body
sensors and it is placed around the wrist.
Flexible Bracelet: To develop the printed board circuits (PCB)
we adopted polyimide film (PI) used as the backing material for
the copper. This is laminated with electrolytic (ED) copper foil
on both sides. The cell uses AKAFLEX® technology from
Kermpel that employs a modified epoxy system characterized
by temperature stability. The processing, acquisition and
Bluetooth core is the CC2650 system on chip produced by
Texas Instruments. The microcontroller has been selected for
its very low current consumption in active mode of only
43μA/MHz using the ARM Cortex M3 core. An important
feature of this microcontroller family is the presence of an ultra-
low power Bluetooth low energy core with a dedicated ARM
cortex M0. Moreover, to increase the energy efficiency in
sensors applications the SoC embeds a sensor controller that
allows the main core to be in sleep mode during data
acquisition. The microcontroller also has three Universal Serial
Communication Interface (USCI) modules, one is configured
as an I2C port to transfer data to an additional NFC/RFID
module, M24LR16E-R from STMicroelectronics. The module
contains an EEPROM that can be read and written by an
external reader NFC/RFID reader. This solution is used to
further reduce the communication power when possible, as it
allows passive wireless communication instead of using the
Bluetooth Low Energy module. However, additional power is
required to transfer the data via I2C from the CC2650 to the
EEPROM. Two additional USCI modules of the
microcontroller are used to interface digital SPI sensor that can
be attached to the human body and bring out 3 analog digital
converter (ADC) pins of the microcontroller that can sample
three additional analog sensors.
Fig. 2. Blocks diagram of the designed bracelet. Sensors can be added via
external digital and analog connectors.
Another important component of the flexible bracelet is the
energy harvesting and power unit subsystem. The energy of the
system is stored in DTP301120 lithium battery chosen due to its
small form factor of only 22x11x3mm and delivering a
maximum energy of 40mAh. As explained in section III, it is
important to operate the solar panels in the MPP to convert the
energy to with the maximum efficiency. In our design, we
selected a state of art integrated circuit from Texas Instruments,
the BQ25570 to guarantee the highest efficiency and lowest
losses. This module also integrates a maximum power point
tracking circuit to continuously adapt the input impedance of the
connected solar cells such that the maximum power can be
extracted and efficiently transferred to the battery. Thanks to the
maximum power point tracking is possible to effectively store
up to 90% of the available electrical output of the solar panel in
rechargeable battery. Where the efficient is meant asᢡ ൌ
ܲ‫ݐݑ݋‬Ȁܲ݅݊, with Pout the power output from the solar panel, and
Pin the power flowing in the battery. The BQ25570 also
includes a highly efficient buck converter that provides a stable
voltage of 3.3V from the lithium battery (3.7V nominal). This
guarantees both small form factor and high conversion
efficiency of up to 95%. The complete bracelet developed is
shown in Fig. 3
Fig. 3. a.Top and bottom view of the flexible bracelet. b. Flexi bracelet worn
on a human wrist c. 3D model of the flexible bracelet.
On-body Sensors: Biomedical sensors are designed for
taking measurements of the human body. As the main aim of the
work is to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a self-
sustainable flexible system, we attached a pulse oximeter and an
accelerometer to our bracelet, however other sensors can be
connected. The pulse-oximeter is used to determine the heart
rate and the arterial oxygen saturation in a non-invasive way. A
temperature and humidity sensor collects information about the
climate in which the body moves. Apart from measuring vital
signals, an accelerometer monitors the movements which can be
used to determine user activity as well as compensating for
sensor measurement errors due to movement.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
To evaluate the performance of the flexible bracelet with
the flexible solar panel, the system has been developed and
tested on the field to measure energy acquired and energy
consumed in different tasks. First of all, we perform a
characterisation test with the solar panel band around the human
wrist (Fig. 3) under a constant illumination of 500 lux (indoor
light), 5’000 lux (outdoor light cloudy) 10’000 lux (outdoor
sunny day). Fig. 4 shows the maximum power of around 18mW
at 10’000lux. However, to evaluate the effective energy
harvested and usable in a real application scenario, it is
necessary to also evaluate the energy that really ended up in the
battery after the entire conversion chain. With this aim, we
carried out in-field measurements logging the data of the
storage connected with the BQ25570 and the incident light.
TABLE II. shows the output-power of the energy harvesting
subsystem as a function of the illumination. Power
measurements for illumination values below 1’000 lux were
conducted indoors, while values above 1’000 lux were captured
outdoors. The measurements show that under a typical office
illumination of 500 lux, 155PW of power can be actually
harvested. Outdoors, with a moderate brightness of 10’000 lux,
up to 16.5mW can be extracted. Note that, even for very low
power output, the measured efficiency of the conversion stage
remains around 85-90%.
 constant illumination of 1000lux. Lower illumination levels are
of course possible by reducing the oxygenation measurement
time further.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
A flexible smart bracelet with flexible energy harvesting has
been presented. The device has been thought to be self-
sustaining and it has been fabricated on flexible PCB to
Fig. 4. Measurements of SP3-12 output characteristics at different improve the comfort for long term monitoring (i.e. biomedical
illumination levels.
devices worn all the time). The use of a flexible solar panels
TABLE II. Experimental evaluation: Illumination vs net extracted power that has been characterized and tested on field in combination
with low power design and management. Experimental results
Illumination (Lux) Extracted Power (mW) show that it is possible to achieve up to 16mW of power in
500 0.15 outdoor condition and 0.21mW in indoor. We implemented a
1’000 0.32 test application where blood oxygenation is acquired every
5’000 1.33 minute and sent by Bluetooth. In the target application the
10’000 16.5 system is self-sustainable with an average illuminance of only
1000lux.
TABLE III. shows energy consumption measured for ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
different modes. The power measurement has been performed This work was in part funded by the Swiss National Science
with the Keysight N6705B DC power analyzer that supplied the Foundation projects ‘MicroLearn: Micropower Deep
nominal voltage of the battery of 3.7V. The clock frequency of Learning’(Nr. 162524) and ‘Transient Computing Systems’
the microcontroller has been set to 48MHz. In this work, we (Nr. 157048).
consider only the pulse-oximeter sensor and the Bluetooth
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