Wearable Peripheral Data Offloading for Battery and Thermal Relief
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Solution Overview
Problem
Wearable devices face challenges in fitting advanced electronics into a small form factor, leading to limited battery life and thermal comfort issues, especially in continuous usage scenarios like smart glasses, which current SoC technologies cannot adequately address.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a split-compute architecture that offloads computation-intensive tasks from the wearable device to a companion device, such as a smartphone or server, using a shared runtime environment to conserve resources and extend battery life.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Power
If phone-class System-on-Chips (SoCs) are used in wearable devices, then advanced display capabilities and computing performance are achieved, but battery life is limited to a few hours and thermal comfort deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system is segmented into two distinct parts: a wearable device with minimal processing components and a companion device (smartphone or server) with full computing capabilities. This segmentation allows the wearable device to offload computationally intensive tasks to the companion device, thereby extending battery life while maintaining access to advanced processing power when needed.
Solution Approach 2:
A companion device acts as an intermediary between the wearable device and the computing resources. The companion device receives peripheral device data from the wearable device, performs the required computing tasks, and returns results to the wearable device. This intermediary approach enables the wearable device to leverage powerful processing without housing the corresponding hardware, thus solving the battery life contradiction.
2Power
If phone-class System-on-Chips (SoCs) are used in wearable devices, then advanced display capabilities are achieved, but thermal comfort deteriorates due to small volume constraints
Solution Approach 1:
The high-power processing components are extracted from the wearable device and placed in the companion device. This extraction removes the primary heat-generating elements from the small-volume wearable device, thereby improving thermal comfort while preserving advanced display capabilities through software rendering on the companion device.
3Speed
If computation-intensive tasks are processed by the wearable device, then processing speed is maintained, but power consumption increases and battery life decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The system transitions from a single-device architecture to a distributed two-device architecture, adding a spatial dimension to the computing system. This dimensional change allows processing tasks to be distributed across different physical locations, with the wearable device handling only essential local processing and the companion device handling intensive tasks, thereby reducing power consumption while maintaining overall system responsiveness.
Data Source
AI summary
A method including communicatively coupling a wearable device with a companion device, mirroring, by the wearable device, data obtained from a peripheral device of the wearable device on the companion device as peripheral data, including obtaining, by the wearable device, the peripheral data from the peripheral device, and communicating, by the wearable device, the peripheral data to the companion device, receiving, by the companion device, the peripheral data and processing the peripheral data into processed data, sending, by the companion device, the processed data to the wearable device, and receiving, by the wearable device, the processed data and utilizing the processed data to complete a computing process.