Miniaturized Zero-Power Infrared Sensor for Persistent and Large-Scale Human Presence Monitoring at Borders

This work reports on a novel near-zero power infrared sensor for maintenance-free remote human presence detection in border security and perimeter monitoring applications. The fundamental difference between this technology compared to existing solutions is that, instead of relying on the continuous use of electricity to operate, our sensor is off-but-always-alert – it does not draw any power from the battery to perform the sensing function, rather, it uses the energy in the infrared radiation emitted by a human body itself. This greatly increases the battery lifetime of the sensor, eliminating the need for frequent battery replacement and associated maintenance costs. In this work, a prototype showing a detection range of 3 meters is demonstrated in a lab environment. The demonstrated technology paves the way to a new class of highly miniaturized, low-cost, large-coverage, lens-less, unattended infrared sensor nodes lasting 10 years or more, enabling covert and a truly “deploy-and-forget” implementation of large-scale, high-granularity sensor networks.