Lifelog Mesh Sensor Network System Supporting Wake-Up Control Function Based on States of Power Generation

Abstract

In order to prevent the lifestyle diseases, it is clarified that the recording of lifelog data related with the location and motions of people is effective. However, the power consumption of the sensor device measuring the lifelog data should be reduced to observe users in a wide area for a long time. On the other hand, an energy harvesting technology that can obtain electric power from nearby energy sources such as solar light, wind, heat, and vibration is attracting attention as a viable alternative to conventional batteries. In addition, to achieve wide-area communication, the mesh network technology is attracting attention because the wide-area sensor network can be constructed even if the communication distance of each sensor device should be short to reduce the power consumption. However, if a power supply from the energy harvesting is very limited, prolonged operation of the wide-area mesh network is challenging because the sensor node can work as a part of the mesh network only in a very limited time. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new method for constructing a mesh sensor network system by controlling the timing of wake-up of sensor devices based on the states of power generation by energy harvesting.