Say Goodbye To Smartphone Batteries, Scientists Create Battery-Free Phone

These days, one of the biggest gripes of everyday people is the short lifespans of their smartphones’ batteries. Many of them don’t last a whole day due to the constant use of numerous apps. Scientists might have finally found a solution to this problem by creating a phone that requires no batteries. In fact, it is powered by light and radio waves.

The discovery was made by researchers from the University of Washington and talked about their discovery in a blog post. Based on the details that the researchers themselves have provided, the phone is still in its early stages of development and only has limited functionality. Even so, being able to make and receive calls without a battery or being hooked up to a plug is still a huge feat.

“We present the first battery-free cellphone design that consumes only a few micro-watts of power,” the post reads. “Our design can sense speech, actuate the earphones, and switch between uplink and downlink communications, all in real time. Our system optimizes transmission and reception of speech while simultaneously harvesting power which enables the battery-free cellphone to operate continuously. The battery-free device prototype is built using commercial-off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board.”

The findings were published in the paper titled “Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies”. One of the authors of the paper is Shyam Gollakota from the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. According to him, they are the first to create a functioning mobile device that does not use up power, Phys.org reports.

"We've built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power," Gollakota said. "To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed."