Ultra-low-power technology is key to both smart houses that call a plumber for you and healthcare monitoring that tells your doctor you need a check-up.

Imagine a world in which everything is smart and wireless, including a sensitive peel-and-stick sensor on your plumbing. It’s perpetually powered by a hot-water pipe’s heat, and when it detects a small leak based on a subtle change in water flow, it texts you a notification – long before the dribble turns into a gusher.

Now multiply that by the objects all around you.

Ultra-low-power technology is enabling a range of new self-sustaining applications that can operate on a mere trickle of power harvested from the environment. And when you combine low-power sensors, for instance, with low-power transmitters, suddenly everything’s wirelessly connected, everything’s in the cloud.

Welcome to the Internet of things.

• The power may be harvested from light (natural or artificial), the vibrations of traffic on a bridge, your walking gait or other forms of previously wasted environmental energy.
• The industrial world is particularly ripe for such applications. Equipment there may be remote, in a hazardous environment or both. Put everything online in a manufacturing plant or a power-generation station, and suddenly you’re increasing efficiency and probably even saving lives.
• Medical systems are an equally promising area, where that trickle of power may come from any number of biological systems and be employed to power a drug delivery device, a blood-glucose monitor or a pacemaker. Batteries are then no longer required, and such devices can contact doctors and nurses whenever necessary.

Indeed devices capable of perpetual or near-perpetual operation will likely appear increasingly in the home, office, factory, public square, hospital and the human body, thanks to rapid advances in ultra-low-power electronic circuitry.

You can even dispense with that text from your water pipe sensor, if you like: Have it contact your plumber directly.