Low-power options are critical to achieving optimal battery life in wearable devices. One common way to save battery life is to offload higher power consuming functions, such as processing and displaying, to something else, such as a smartphone or tablet. Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth Low Energy is automatically built into most smartphones, and is the standard wireless communication for wearables. Bluetooth can be used to send information from the smartphone to the wearable, which is a viable offloading option.
Another low-power option is choosing to design your wearables using an ultra-low-power microcontroller. MCU’s are super-savers when it comes to power, since they can process data quickly and go to sleep, in turn, saving power.
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Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)