Battery-Aware Power Management Techniques for Wearable Haptic Nodes

Haptic feedback provides an effective means of transferring information through tactile stimulation. In this work we look into the use of tactors for haptic feedback in body-worn contexts where individuals are allowed to move around. In this context it is crucial to design low power systems that allow the activation of multiple tactors at the same time with limited battery power. We investigate how to minimize tactor power consumption by tuning the characteristics of their excitatory signal and present an activation policy to maximize the number of tactors that can be simultaneously powered by a battery under a tight peak current constraint. The proposed optimizations reduce power consumption and allow a much higher number of simultaneously active tactors. Furthermore, we provide a design strategy whereby designers can tune the maximum number of simultaneously allowed active tactors based on battery and system requirements.