EVERACTIVE, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF203-CSO1

Description

At Everactive, we believe that the key limitation to further adoption of IoT devices for monitoring any and all industrial assets is the limited battery lifetime of those devices. All wireless devices that operate on batteries will eventually need that battery replaced, and quite often battery lifetimes are limited to 1-3 years (or less, in many industrial use cases). Maintaining a system powered by batteries requires an operator to put these devices on a maintenance schedule, thus trading one maintenance problem (asset inspection) for another (battery replacement). This creates a significant barrier to deploying such systems, which explains why the IoT has not lived up to the lofty projections of Trillions of devices - yet.   Utilizing proprietary ultra-low power IC designs developed specifically for batteryless sensors, Everactive builds completely self-powered sensing systems that do not require batteries or maintenance, are deployable nearly anywhere, and unlock new data streams that generate significant value for our industrial customers. Everactive sensor node microsystems, called Eversensors, can harvest energy from many environmental sources (e.g., low-level indoor light, temperature gradients, vibration) to collect data, process it on-node, and transmit it wirelessly for cloud-based analytics.   Currently, Everactive’s batteryless solutions for Steam Trap Monitoring (STM) and Machine Health Monitoring (MHM) are monitoring about one thousand industrial assets at Hill Air Force Base. In this program, Everactive proposes to leverage its self-powered sensing capabilities to identify and address additional Air Force needs for new products that assess the health of assets, detect or predict failures, and report overall readiness levels.