Harvesting energy from human kinesis for indoor environment sensing

A vision of autonomous supply of microelectronic sensors without batteries making them perpetual is a driving force of the research related to ambient energy harvesting. Energy harnessing aims at extracting energy from various ambient energy "pools", which are generally cost-or power-ineffective to be scaled up for full-size, power-plant energy generation schemes supplying energy in electric form. These include - but are not limited to - waste heat, electromagnetic hum, vibrations, light, water and air flow as well as human-generated power, which can be exploited at a miniature scale by energy scavengers. However, in case of taking advantage of energy harvesting strategy for powering up sensors installed inside buildings adaptable energy sources are limited in number, spatial and temporal accessibility as well as available power. The paper explores experimentally an energy harvesting approach to exploit human kinesis in a building interior environment for battery-less supply of a wireless sensor node. The node, fitted with an integrated multi-parameter environmental MEMS-DRIE sensor offers the ability to monitor ambient air properties (pressure, humidity and temperature) and publicize measurement data using cloud-based IoT web service.