Wearable technology

Quantum mechanics

Computer hardware

Textile

Voltage

Engineering

Materials science

Embedded system

Operating system

Radio frequency

Power (physics)

Computer science

Energy harvesting

Antenna (radio)

Diode

Interfacing

Rectifier (neural networks)

Stochastic neural network

Physics

Rectification

Wearable computer

Electronic engineering

Environmental science

Composite material

Artificial neural network

Recurrent neural network

Machine learning

Thread (computing)

Electrical engineering

Rectenna

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation

In this article, we demonstrate flexible and lightweight textile-integrated rectenna arrays for powering wearable electronic devices. We propose a method to exploit large clothingareas to integrate arrays consisting of 2 × 2 and 2 × 3 rectenna elements. Each element comprises a patch antenna and a rectifier which are fabricated using embroidery of conductive thread on the textile substrates. The rectifier used single-diode circuit configuration and showed a radio frequency (RF)-to-dc conversion efficiency of 70% for an applied input RF-power of 8 dBm at its input port. We also present several tests to demonstrate the applicability of the rectenna array. Specifically, in boosted-Wi-Fi modality, a dc power of 600 μW was collected at 10 cm from the source and 80 μW was collected at 60 cm from the source. These demonstrations show the proposed system's applicability for charging and powering low-power wearable electronic devices.

Textile-Based Large Area RF-Power Harvesting System for Wearable Applications