Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Nodes with Augmented Reality Application Support

Wireless Sensor Nodes are currently used in fields such as industrial automation, Internet-of-Things, smart marketing, and even medicine, where they are implanted in living organisms. In order to remove all the hassles and design challenges of a battery powered device, the paper proposes an ultra-low power wireless nodes system that can be sustained with thermal energy harvesting alone. Combined with an Augmented Reality application, it is a self-sustainable, eco-friendly and intuitive way of gathering data without requiring maintenance or human intervention. A minimal footprint prototype is presented, along with the steps taken to keep the average current consumption to a minimum while fully maintaining system functionality: dynamically updating connection parameters as required, and optimizing the software running on the Wireless Sensor Nodes. The results of this research are sustained by the simulations, measurements and tests presented in the paper.