I2C-Enabled Batteryless Sensors on Double-Layered Conductive Fabric

Abstract

We present detachable, batteryless, and Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C)-enabled sensor nodes that operate on clothes for wearable sensor systems. A double-layered conductive fabric is used as a signal bus. The clock and data signals of iic protocol respectively modulate two carriers with different frequencies. The two modulated radio-frequency (RF) signals and dc power are simultaneously transferred via the fabric bus, in the manner of frequency division multiplexing. A modulation and demodulation circuit is designed to enable using off-the-shelf I2C-interfaced sensor ICs. The proposed scheme enables flexible implementation of wearable sensor systems in which large number of sensor nodes are distributed all over the clothes.