Imagine that you wake up in the morning and your coffee machine automatically starts preparing your favorite coffee for you. You leave your house, sit in the driverless car that is driving you safely to your work. After a long day of work when you come back home, you see that your smart refrigerator detected that you are running out of some products and ordered everything for you. All these scenarios are possible with the Internet of Things (IoT) in the future where billions of wireless sensors are used to facilitate people’s daily activities.
All IoT devices need energy to communicate and the energy consumption is still one of the main challenges towards the implementation of IoT. Our Ph.D. student Azamat Bakytbekov developed a solution to charge IoT sensors by collecting electromagnetic signals from the environment. This paper has been published in Nano Energy journal with the highest Impact Factor (13) in the energy field. He believes that it is not far away when devices will be charging autonomously from 3G, WiFi and other signals and people can forget the feeling of pain when the gadgets are running out of battery.