Energy Use Coordinator for Multiple Personal Sensor Devices

Useful continuous sensing applications are increasingly emerging as a new class of mobile applications. Meanwhile, open, multi-use sensor devices are newly adopted beyond smartphones, and provide huge opportunities to expand potential application categories. In this upcoming environment, uncoordinated use of sensor devices would cause severe imbalance in power consumption of devices, and thus result in early shutdown of some sensing applications depending on power-hungry devices. In this paper, we propose EnergyCordy, a novel inter-device energy use coordination system; with a system-wide holistic view, it coordinates the energy use of concurrent sensing applications over multiple sensor devices. As its key approach, we propose a relaxed sensor association; it decouples the energy use of an application from specific sensor devices leveraging multiple context inference alternatives, allowing flexible energy coordination at runtime. We demonstrated the effectiveness of EnergyCordy by developing multiple example applications over custom-designed wearable senor devices. We show that EnergyCordy effectively coordinates the power usage of concurrent sensing applications over multiple devices and prevent undesired early shutdown of applications.