Fingerprinting Battery Health Using Relaxing Voltages

Abstract

Mobile devices are only as useful as their battery lasts. Unfortunately, the operation and life of a mobile device’s battery degrade over time and usage. The state-of-health (SoH) of batteries quantifies their degradation, but mobile devices are unable to support its accurate estimation — despite its importance — due mainly to their limited hardware and dynamic usage patterns, causing various problems such as unexpected device shutoffs or even fire/explosion. To remedy this lack of support, we design, implement and evaluate V-Health, a low-cost user-level SoH estimation service for mobile devices based only on their battery voltage, which is universally available on all commodity mobile devices. The design of V-Health is inspired by our empirical finding that the relaxing voltages of a device battery fingerprint its SoH, and is steered by extensive measurements with 15 batteries used for various commodity mobile devices, such as iPhone 6 Plus, Nexus 6P, Galaxy S3, etc. These measurements consist of 13,377 battery discharging/charging/resting cycles and have been conducted over 72 months cumulatively. V-Health has been evaluated via both laboratory experiments and field-tests with multiple Android devices over 4–6 months, showing < error in SoH estimation.