Breaking the Battery Barrier
This whitepaper explores the use cases for asset tracking, the range of solutions available, and how to solve the battery problem in IoT.
How to plan a battery-free future for IoT asset tracking
By the end of 2018, there were around 22 billion IoT connected devices in use around the world – and forecasts suggest this could grow to 50 billion by 2030.
In business, industry, healthcare – almost any setting, in fact – smart beacons and sensors are tracking everything from lighting conditions and temperature to the location and use of equipment.
Yet this explosion in the implementation of smart technology could be held back by a seemingly mundane issue – battery power. Powering billions of IoT sensors will require billions of batteries. And therefore, billions of battery changes and disposals.
Even in this best case scenario for battery life, the number of battery changes is staggering. If we had 50 billion devices with a battery life of 10 years, we would be changing 14 million batteries a day. And with a more realistic battery life of three years, that figure grows to 46 million a day.
Putting that in a practical context, an IoT deployment of 10,000 connected devices – such as in a large hospital, warehouse, or manufacturing shopfloor – would require the timely replacement and disposal of over 800 batteries per month.
As well as being an obvious sustainability issue, the need to change batteries across a large number of devices can have a significant cost in both purchasing batteries and paying people to replace them.
So, what to do about this battery barrier? This whitepaper explores the use cases for asset tracking, the range of solutions available, and how to solve this unsustainable power problem by moving towards battery-free IoT.
