A battery-free, perpetual vital-signs monitoring patch (internship project, Nokia Bell Labs)
Wearables like smartwatches, earbuds, and rings are becoming central to health monitoring, but battery life limits long-term use, and many older adults — who stand to benefit most — face barriers to using digital devices at all. BioPulse is a perpetual, patch form-factor device built to address both: it estimates heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood pressure using a sparse sampling algorithm combined with NFC-based energy transfer and communication, operating entirely without a battery.
The BioPulse patch (left) and its sparse-sampling, NFC-powered architecture (right), which cuts power consumption by 57.9%.
In evaluation against a ground-truth device, BioPulse achieves a mean absolute error of 5.6 mmHg for systolic and 4.5 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure — a sustainable, accessible approach to continuous vital-signs monitoring (Reddy et al., 2025). Built during an internship with the Pervasive Systems group at Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge.
References
2025
HotMobile
BioPulse: Towards Enabling Perpetual Vital Signs Monitoring using a Body Patch
C. Rajashekar Reddy , Vivian Dsouza , Ashok Samraj Thangarajan , Przemysław Pawełczak , Fahim Kawsar , and Alessandro Montanari
In Proceedings of the 26th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile ’25), 2025
Continuous monitoring of vital signs has become increasingly important for digital healthcare and enhancing self-awareness. Wearable devices like smartwatches, earbuds, and rings are gaining widespread acceptance for health monitoring. However, two significant challenges remain: (i) the limited battery life of these devices makes them unsustainable for long-term use, and (ii) many older adults, who would benefit most from health monitoring, often face barriers due to limited digital literacy. To address these issues, we introduce BioPulse—a perpetual, patch form-factor device designed for continuous monitoring. BioPulse estimates key parameters for cardiac health such as heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood pressure. By utilising a sparse sampling algorithm alongside NFC-based energy transfer and communication, the system operates without a battery, achieving a 57.9% reduction in power consumption.
@inproceedings{reddy2025biopulse,title={BioPulse: Towards Enabling Perpetual Vital Signs Monitoring using a Body Patch},author={Reddy, C. Rajashekar and Dsouza, Vivian and Thangarajan, Ashok Samraj and Pawe\l{}czak, Przemys\l{}aw and Kawsar, Fahim and Montanari, Alessandro},booktitle={Proceedings of the 26th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile '25)},year={2025},pages={103--108},address={New York, NY, USA},publisher={Association for Computing Machinery},doi={10.1145/3708468.3711891},category={Full Paper}}
