Amulet: An Energy-Efficient, Multi-Application Wearable Platform

Wearable technology enables a range of exciting new applications in health, commerce, and beyond. For many important applications, wearables must have battery life measured in weeks or months, not hours and days as in most current devices. Our vision of wearable platforms aims for long battery life but with the flexibility and security to support multiple applications. To achieve long battery life with a workload comprising apps from multiple developers, these platforms must have robust mechanisms for app isolation and developer tools for optimizing resource usage. We introduce the Amulet Platform for constrained wearable devices, which includes an ultra-low-power hardware architecture and a companion software framework, including a highly efficient event-driven programming model, low-power operating system, and developer tools for profiling ultra-low-power applications at compile time. We present the design and evaluation of our prototype Amulet hardware and software, and show how the framework enables developers to write energy-efficient applications. Our prototype has battery lifetime lasting weeks or even months, depending on the application, and our interactive resource-profiling tool predicts battery lifetime within 6-10% of the measured lifetime.