Abstract
Personal mobile devices such as smartwatches, smart jewelry, and smart clothes have launched a new trend in the Internet of Things (IoT) era, namely the Internet of Wearable Things (IoWT). These wearables are small IoT devices capable of sensing, storing, processing, and exchanging data to assist users by improving their everyday life tasks through various applications. However, the IoWT has also brought new challenges for the research community to address such as increasing demand for enhanced computational power, better communication capabilities, improved security and privacy features, reduced form factor, minimal weight, and better comfort. Most wearables are battery-powered devices that need to be recharged – therefore, the limited battery life remains the bottleneck leading to the need to enhance the energy efficiency of wearables, thus, becoming an active research area. This paper presents a survey of energy-efficient solutions proposed for diverse IoWT applications by following the systematic literature review method. The available techniques published from 2010 to 2020 are scrutinized, and the taxonomy of the available solutions is presented based on the targeted application area. Moreover, a comprehensive qualitative analysis compares the proposed studies in each application area in terms of their advantages, disadvantages, and main contributions. Furthermore, a list of the most significant performance parameters is provided. A more in-depth discussion of the main techniques to enhance wearables’ energy efficiency is presented by highlighting the trade-offs involved. Finally, some potential future research directions are highlighted.
Highlights
The advent of small, inexpensive, and battery-powered computing units such as microprocessors and micro-controllers have paved the way for developing a wide variety of small form-factor devices that can be connected between each other and to the Internet
The main contributions provided in this paper are: 1) Presenting a taxonomy of the Internet of Wearable Things (IoWT) solutions from an energy efficiency perspective based on the targeted application area classifying them into four categories: healthcare, activity recognition, smart environments, and general solutions
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This section discusses the research methodology adopted to carry out this systematic literature review, which is based on the PRISMA guidelines, proposed in [31]
Summary
The advent of small, inexpensive, and battery-powered computing units such as microprocessors and micro-controllers have paved the way for developing a wide variety of small form-factor devices that can be connected between each other and to the Internet. Work by Seneviratne et al [8] presented a survey and classification of different commercially available wearable devices as per their functionality and wearability It presents a general discussion on wearables’ energy efficiency enumerating limited strategies, namely battery advancements, efficient sensing, and energy harvesting. We provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art energy efficiency solutions for wearables following the systematic literature review methodology to fill in this gap in the IoWT technology. The main contributions provided in this paper are: 1) Presenting a taxonomy of the IoWT solutions from an energy efficiency perspective based on the targeted application area classifying them into four categories: healthcare, activity recognition, smart environments, and general solutions. The summary of the review is drawn in the last section
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