Wireless, self-powered sensors promise to enable easy monitoring of elderly people’s health.

Imagine a world in which we’re surrounded by wireless sensors that monitor environmental conditions such as air quality, and they all simply scavenge the power they need from sunlight and elsewhere.

The first glimmer of that day is already here.

TI’s bq25504 boost charger doesn’t actually harvest energy, but it handles all the heavy lifting in between a harvester such as a solar cell and an electronic device. TI engineers developed innovative circuits and new architectures to enable the bq25504 to extract the maximum amount energy from individual harvesters.

And it does this operating on as little as 330 nano-amps – one-tenth the power anyone else has achieved – helping enable an array of applications.

• The bq25504 delivers enough energy to run the sort of wireless sensors that will probably find their earliest application in enabling much more refined control of lights and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems.
• With no batteries to replace, such sensors could soon be widely deployed to monitor the condition of bridges and other infrastructure, the state of hazardous or restricted industrial areas, the health of people with chronic illnesses and much more.
• Energy efficiency in buildings hinges in part upon highly granular control, so instead of regulating one whole floor of a building with a few thermostats, now you can have a wireless self-powered thermostat on every desk. Studies have shown that such smart systems can improve HVAC efficiency in a building by up to 30 percent.
• The bq25504 design team’s innovative approach to achieving high efficiency at low voltage should have a ripple effect, reducing power consumption in many other systems during their sleep state, which is where most systems spend most of their time.
• Decreasing the use of batteries (or greatly extending their lives) could slash the amount ending up in landfills.

Experts think wireless sensors will be among the first applications for this technology, but one of the most interesting developments after that will be seeing what other innovative uses the world’s design engineers come up with for it.