Kicking Yourself Awake: Towards self-powering mats for room-level localization and occupancy detection

Motivated by the desire to reduce wiring costs in building occupancy monitoring systems, we explore the feasibility of waking a sensor node precisely when an event of interest occurs. We realize this through the use of piezoelectric devices that can be used to sense pressure and to harvest enough energy to wake and power a wireless sensor node. We envision their use in self-powering floor mats that can be placed at the entrance of each room that are awoken by a footstep and send footstep counts to an occupancy monitoring system. Early prototype measurements suggest that sufficient energy is generated from a footstep and that the piezo signal is accurate enough to identify footsteps and their direction.