Researchers at Microsoft have figured out a way to make wearable devices last much longer on a single charge as part of a project called WearDrive, which is aimed at substantially improving the battery life of wearables.
WearDrive itself essentially works by offloading the most battery-intensive operations to the smartphone that the wearable device is paired with, doing so over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The actual wearable device is then tasked with much less processing.
"WearDrive leverages low-power network connectivity available on wearables to trade the phone's battery for the wearable's by performing large and energy-intensive tasks on the phone while performing small and energy-efficient tasks locally using battery-backed RAM," says the paper's abstract. "WearDrive improves the performance of wearable applications by up to 8.85x and improves battery life up to 3.69x with negligible impact to the phone's battery life."
The idea is that most wearables today use battery-saving techniques that were developed for smartphones, not for wearable devices. While they still somewhat help save battery, they do not save as much as they could.
"Everyone has been thinking of reusing what exists for mobile devices," said Ranveer Chandra, a principal researcher at Microsoft in an interview at Technet. "What we're saying is, 'It's a different paradigm. It's a different usage scenario.'"
Wearable devices present a number of battery challenges because they're designed to always be on the wearer's body, collecting information at all times. Not only that, but because users are wearing the device during the day, wearable device makers cant use large batteries as they add to the weight of the device.
Of course, this new system also presents other challenges, namely the fact that in order to function properly, the wearable device will always have to be connected to a smartphone. The developers of the system have designed it so that when a wearable is not paired, the device will simply take care of all processing itself. This will strain the battery, however, once the device is reconnected to a smartphone, it will once again offload processing.
Microsoft's own wearable, the Microsoft Band, is recognized because of its great battery life, but WearDrive isn't currently being used in the Band. Microsoft says, however, that it welcomes projects like WearDrive because of the impact that it could have on future devices.
The researchers tested their system through an Android phone and a wearable device that was able to connect to Android devices.
