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ZEUSSS: Zero Energy Ubiquitous Sound Sensing Surface Leveraging Triboelectric Nanogenerator and Analog Backscatter Communication

  • October 2018
DOI:10.1145/3266037.3266108
  • Conference: The 31st Annual ACM Symposium
Authors:
Nivedita Arora at Georgia Institute of Technology
Nivedita Arora
Gregory Abowd at Georgia Institute of Technology
Gregory Abowd
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Abstract and Figures

ZEUSSS (Zero Energy Ubiquitous Sound Sensing Surface), allows physical objects and surfaces to be instrumented with a thin, self-sustainable material that provides acoustic sensing and communication capabilities. We have built a prototype ZEUSSS tag using minimal hardware and flexible electronic components, extending our original self-sustaining SATURN microphone with a printed, flexible antenna to support passive communication via analog backscatter. ZEUSSS enables objects to have ubiquitous wire-free battery-free audio based context sensing, interaction, and surveillance capabilities.
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ZEUSSS : Zero Energy Ubiquitous Sound Sensing Surface
Leveraging Triboelectric Nanogenerator and Analog
Backscatter Communication
Nivedita Arora
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
nivedita.arora@gatech.edu
Gregory D. Abowd
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
abowd@gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
ZEUSSS (
Z
ero
E
nergy
U
biquitous
S
ound
S
ensing
S
urface),
allows physical objects and surfaces to be instrumented with a
thin, self-sustainable material that provides acoustic sensing
and communication capabilities. We have built a prototype
ZEUSSS tag using minimal hardware and flexible electronic
components, extending our original self-sustaining SATURN
microphone [3] with a printed, flexible antenna to support pas-
sive communication via analog backscatter. ZEUSSS enables
objects to have ubiquitous wire-free battery-free audio based
context sensing, interaction, and surveillance capabilities.
ACM Classification Keywords
Human-centered computing: Interaction devices—Sound-
based input / output; Hardware: Communication hardware,
interfaces and storage—Wireless integrated network sensors
Author Keywords
Battery-free Microphone; Analog Backscatter
Communication; TENG (Triboelectric Nanogenerator);
Flexible electronics
INTRODUCTION
Physical surfaces and objects enhanced with acoustic sensing
and communication capabilities provide an opportunity for an
unprecedented understanding of human behavior as well as
novel ways of interaction and control in our environment [1,
2, 22].
A practical design solution for such an ambitious vision re-
quires system-level innovation. The form-factor of electronics
- for sensing and communication - should be such that it can
be easily embedded into or on top of any object [7, 13]. The
system design should be self-sustainable from an energy per-
spective, requiring no battery maintenance [15, 8]. In addition,
the system should be low-cost and require minimal hardware
to provide manufacturing scalability in the future. Over the
last decade we have witnessed technological progress on all
these fronts. Advances in materials and additive fabrication
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UIST’18 Adjunct, October 14–17, 2018, Berlin, Germany.
Copyright © 2018 Association of Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5949-8/18/10 ...$15.00.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3266037.3266108
techniques have enabled electronic components for communi-
cation [18, 6, 5] and sensing [21, 20, 10, 9] to be thin and flexi-
ble in form factor [23]. In addition, techniques for battery-free
communication through ambient [11, 19] or analog backscat-
ter [17] have demonstrated ground-breaking self-sustainable
systems [12, 16]. These advances motivate our desire to unite
the separate themes of self-sustainable sensing and commu-
nication and build prototypes of easily-instrumented physical
surfaces and objects.
This paper examines more closely the design requirements and
research progress for audio sensing to build ZEUSSS, Zero
Energy Ubiquitous Sound Sensing Surface. Specifically, we
explore opportunities to create a low-cost and flexible material
that can provide acoustic sensing and wireless communication
without the need of a local battery source.
SYSTEM DESIGN
Figure 1: ZEUSSS Tag (a) SATURN : a thin and flexible self-
powered microphone leveraging Triboelectric Nanogenerator
(TENG) [3] (b) SATURN connected to printed antenna using
n-JFET and impedance matching circuit
Our recently published work, the SATURN
1
(Self-powered
Audio Triboelectric Ultra-thin Rollable Nanogenerator) mi-
crophone, see Figure 1(a), demonstrates design, fabrication,
evaluation, and use of a self-powered microphone that is thin,
1SATURN video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLuZHpa_FIM
Poster Session
UIST'18 Adjunct, October 14–17, 2018, Berlin, Germany
81
flexible, and easily manufactured [3]. SATURN leverages the
design of Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) which relies
on combined triboelectrification and electrostatic induction
effects, to convert tiny vibrations induced on the surface of an
object by sound, or any other vibration, into an electric signal
output.
Electrically, SATURN is a variable capacitor and voltage gen-
erator source, similar to the common electret microphone. As
shown in Figure 1(b), we built a ZEUSSS tag to implement
analog backscatter communication such that the sensed quan-
tity, audio in our case, can directly modify the impedance of
the 915 MHz printed dipole antenna. This is done by connect-
ing SATURN to the gate terminal of the JFET with no DC
voltage on the drain terminal. The voltage across the drain and
source terminals of the JFET,
VDS
= 0, biases the device in the
triode region, making it a voltage-regulated resistor, changing
the impedance of the circuit as a function of the sensed audio.
Figure 2: Experimental setup of ZEUSSS consisting of self-
powered flexible microphone communication tag and USRP-
SDR based RFID reader
Inspired by recent battery-free audio communications work
[16, 17], the ZEUSSS tag communicates sound to a commer-
cial USRP-based RFID reader at 915 MHz in a purely analog
mode using amplitude modulation. According to backscatter
theory [4], the sound received is a function of a reflection
coefficient
τ
of the backscattered signal. The sound at the
USRP end is extracted using a band pass filter and evaluated
using Perceptual Evaluation of Sounds Quality (PESQ) scores
[14]. The backscattered signal quality is directly dependent
on the original signal produced by the SATURN microphone
and inversely on the distance between the reader and the tag.
To maintain sound quality for longer distance communication,
we would increase the SATURN patch size to increase the
backscattered signal strength.
APPLICATIONS
The thin and flexible form factor of ZEUSSS allows it to be
placed on top of different physical surfaces for self-sustainable
audio sensing and communication. We imagine scenarios
where many different ZEUSSS tags in the home can cheaply
extend the range of audio input for home assistants (e.g., Ama-
zon Echo or Google Home), which are currently limited to
a room. ZEUSSS could be a ubiquitous battery-free audio
surveillance microphone which can determine context like –
is someone is present in the room, who is present, listen in on
sound stimuli like conversations or music. Multiple ZEUSSS
Figure 3: Applications for ZEUSSS
tags in a room would allow for location tracking of sound
sources or even acoustic characterization of a physical space.
In addition to audio sensing, ZEUSSS tag can also be used
as a contact microphone to sense input touches, such that dif-
ferent speed or force of taps could be detected. This could
extend input gesture and control capability for IoT applica-
tions like switching light on or off or changing brightness.
ZEUSSS could be used as an authentication device, where
users can speak, blow, whistle, tap or create unique combi-
nation of these as their password to do a remote login. With
applications in wireless self-sustainable remote interaction,
control, surveillance, localization and authentication ZEUSSS
has great potential for impact in the UIST community in the
future.
FUTURE WORK
Triboelectric Nanogenerators (TENG) have attracted a great
deal of attention as a self-powered sensor for detecting varied
mechanical stimuli, such as sound, physical touch, biological
movement, physiological sensing, linear displacement, rota-
tion, and wind speed. All of these initial demonstrations have
required a power intensive device, such as a micro-controller
or oscilloscope, for sensor data collection, which reduces the
overall self-powered advantage of the TENG sensor. ZEUSSS
is the very first example of a completely self-powered sens-
ing and data collection solution based on the combination of
TENG and analog-backscatter communication. Such an ar-
chitecture can be further expanded for passive sensing and
communication of many different mechanical forces and vi-
brations in our environment, which promises to open doors for
new applications in interaction, control and contextual sensing
domain.
CONCLUSION
ZEUSSS is a work in progress where we are currently building
our prototype to optimize the design parameters which would
enable it to sense sound, communicate, and be instrumented
on physical surfaces. The new application avenues which
ZEUSSS offers for interaction, control and surveillance makes
it potentially a compelling work for the UIST community.
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... Another example is to use mechanical energy harvesters to both sense mechanical vibration and communicate that information. SATURN [4,3] is a thin flexible material which can sense tiny mechanical vibration caused by human voice or touch and then transmit it using RF backscatter technology (see Fig 2). Ubiquitous presence of such self-sustainable, or very low energy, requiring surfaces can provide enormous contextual understanding, interactive and surveillance capabilities. ...
... Customisable electrochromic (EC) displays [10] (see example of display in Fig 1 (bottom)) enable unique devices that show promise of being practically incorporated into any domestic object. SATURN [4,3] is a wireless mechanical sensing material which looks and feels so like paper that it can be embedded into everyday objects, yet it behaves like a wireless microphone (see Fig 2). Finally, advances in additive manufacturing, flexible electronics and energy harvesting techniques allow us to build novel self-sustainable computational materials which in the words of Mark Weiser, "can weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives until they are indistinguishable from it", leading to the rise of a new generation of computing, Internet of Materials (IoM). ...
... Top: SATURN -thin and flexible self-powered microphone[4] , Bottom: ZEUSSS : Zero-energy Ubiquitous Sound Sensing Surface[3]. ...
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  • Jun 2017
We present the first battery-free cellphone design that consumes only a few micro-watts of power. Our design can sense speech, actuate the earphones, and switch between uplink and downlink communications, all in real time. Our system optimizes transmission and reception of speech while simultaneously harvesting power which enables the battery-free cellphone to operate continuously. The battery-free device prototype is built using commercial-off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board. It can operate on power that is harvested from RF signals transmitted by a basestation 31 feet (9.4 m) away. Further, using power harvested from ambient light with tiny photodiodes, we show that our device can communicate with a basestation that is 50 feet (15.2 m) away. Finally, we perform the first Skype call using a battery-free phone over a cellular network, via our custom bridged basestation. This we believe is a major leap in the capability of battery-free devices and a step towards a fully functional battery-free cellphone.
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Additively Manufactured Nanotechnology and Origami-Enabled Flexible Microwave Electronics
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Inkjet printing on flexible paper and additive manufacturing technologies (AMT) are introduced for the sustainable ultra-low-cost fabrication of flexible radio frequency (RF)/microwave electronics and sensors. This paper covers examples of state-of-the-art integrated wireless sensor modules on paper or flexible polymers and shows numerous inkjet-printed passives, sensors, origami, and microfluidics topologies. It also demonstrates additively manufactured antennas that could potentially set the foundation for the truly convergent wireless sensor ad-hoc networks of the future with enhanced cognitive intelligence and “zero-power” operability through ambient energy harvesting and wireless power transfer. The paper also discusses the major challenges for the realization of inkjet-printed/3-D printed high-complexity flexible modules as well as future directions in the area of environmentally-friendly “Green”) RF electronics and “Smart-House” conformal sensors.
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Technologies for Printing Sensors and Electronics Over Large Flexible Substrates: A Review
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Printing sensors and electronics over flexible substrates are an area of significant interest due to low-cost fabrication and possibility of obtaining multifunctional electronics over large areas. Over the years, a number of printing technologies have been developed to pattern a wide range of electronic materials on diverse substrates. As further expansion of printed technologies is expected in future for sensors and electronics, it is opportune to review the common features, the complementarities, and the challenges associated with various printing technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive review of various printing technologies, commonly used substrates and electronic materials. Various solution/dry printing and contact/noncontact printing technologies have been assessed on the basis of technological, materials, and process-related developments in the field. Critical challenges in various printing techniques and potential research directions have been highlighted. Possibilities of merging various printing methodologies have been explored to extend the lab developed standalone systems to high-speed roll-to-roll production lines for system level integration.
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(Invited) Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Self-Powered Flexible Electronics and Internet of Things
Article
  • Apr 2018
Triboelectrification is an effect known to society ever since the ancient Greek era, but it is usually considered a negative effect and avoided in many technologies. We have recently invented a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that is used to convert mechanical energy into electricity by a conjunction of triboelectrification and electrostatic induction. As for this power generation unit, in the inner circuit, a potential is created by the triboelectric effect due to the charge transfer between two thin organic/inorganic films that exhibit opposite tribo-polarity; in the outer circuit, electrons are driven to flow between two electrodes attached on the back sides of the films in order to balance the potential. Ever since the first report of the TENG in January 2012, the output power density of TENG has been improved for five orders of magnitude within 12 months. The area power density reaches 500 W/m ² , and a conversion efficiency of ~50-85% has been demonstrated. The TENG can be applied to harvest all kind mechanical energy that is available but wasted in our daily life, such as human motion, walking, vibration, mechanical triggering, rotating tire, wind, flowing water and more. Alternatively, TENG can also be used as a self-powered sensor for actively detecting the static and dynamic processes arising from mechanical agitation using the voltage and current output signals of the TENG, respectively, with potential applications for touch pad and smart skin technologies. The TENG is possible not only for self-powered portable electronics, but also as a new energy technology with a potential of contributing to the world energy in the near future. [1] Z.L. Wang, Materials Today, 20 (2017) 74-82. [2] “Nanogenerators for Self-Powered Devices and Systems”, by Z.L. Wang, published by Georgia Institute of Technology (first book for free online download): http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/39262 [3] Z.L. Wang, L. Lin, J. Chen. S.M. Niu, Y.L. Zi “Triboelectric Nanogenerators”, Springer, 2016. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319400389 [4] Z.L. Wang “Triboelectric Nanogenerators as New Energy Technology for Self-Powered Systems and as Active Mechanical and Chemical Sensors”, ACS Nano 7 (2013) 9533-9557. [5] Z.L. Wang, J. Chen, L. Lin “Progress in triboelectric nanogenerators as new energy technology and self-powered sensors”, Energy & Environmental Sci, 8 (2015) 2250-2282.
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3D printing wireless connected objects
Article
  • Nov 2017
Our goal is to 3D print wireless sensors, input widgets and objects that can communicate with smartphones and other Wi-Fi devices, without the need for batteries or electronics. To this end, we present a novel toolkit for wireless connectivity that can be integrated with 3D digital models and fabricated using commodity desktop 3D printers and commercially available plastic filament materials. Specifically, we introduce the first computational designs that 1) send data to commercial RF receivers including Wi-Fi, enabling 3D printed wireless sensors and input widgets, and 2) embed data within objects using magnetic fields and decode the data using magnetometers on commodity smartphones. To demonstrate the potential of our techniques, we design the first fully 3D printed wireless sensors including a weight scale, flow sensor and anemometer that can transmit sensor data. Furthermore, we 3D print eyeglass frames, armbands as well as artistic models with embedded magnetic data. Finally, we present various 3D printed application prototypes including buttons, smart sliders and physical knobs that wirelessly control music volume and lights as well as smart bottles that can sense liquid flow and send data to nearby RF devices, without batteries or electronics.
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Application of 3D Printing for Smart Objects with Embedded Electronic Sensors and Systems
Article
  • Feb 2016
Applications of a 3D printing process are presented. This process integrates liquid-state printed components and interconnects with IC chips in all three dimensions, various orientations, and multiple printing layers to deliver personalized system-level functionalities. As an example application, a form-fitting glove is demonstrated with embedded programmable heater, temperature sensor, and the associated control electronics for thermotherapeutic treatment.
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Beyond Weiser: From Ubiquitous to Collective Computing
Article
Considering the technological changes across computing's first three generations, how might the next serve humanity? Three critical technologies--the cloud, the crowd, and the shroud of devices connecting the physical and digital worlds--define the fourth generation of collective computing.
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