Shyam Gollakota, a Professor at the University of Washington in the U.S said " We have created what we believe is the first ever functioning mobile phone that consumes almost zero power".
Scientists eliminated a power-consuming step in most modern cellular transmission by changing analogue signals that carry sound into digital data that a phone can understand.
The scientists said that the procedure consumes so much energy which has made it impossible to design a mobile phone that can depend on ambient power sources. Rather, the battery-free mobile phone makes use of tiny vibrations in a phone's microphone or speaker which occurs when someone is talking into the phone or listening to a phone call.
To transmit a speech, the phone makes use of vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive a speech, the phone converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations which are been collected by the phone's speaker. In the prototype that was made, the user pushes a button to switch between these two modes (transmitting and receiving) said the scientists.
The prototype could carryout out simple mobile phone functions such as transmitting speech and data and receiving user input through buttons.While using Skype, the scientists were able to receive incoming calls, dial out and place callers on hold with the battery-fee mobile phone.
They also designed a custom based station to send and receive the radio signals. The innovation possibly could be coordinated into standard cellular network infrastructure or Wi-Fi routers now commonly used for making calls.
A research associate in the University of Washington by name Vamsi Talla said "You could imagine in the future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it, and if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery free cell phone coverage everywhere".
The battery-free mobile phone does still require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The model has a power spending plan of 3.5 microwatts.
Scientists exhibited how to gather this little measure of energy from two distinct sources. The battery-free mobile phone can function on power gotten from ambient radio signals gotten from a base station of up to 31 feet away.
They said by utilizing power reaped from ambient light with little solar cells which is roughly the size of a grain of rice, the device was able to communicate with a base station which was 50 feet away'.
The study was published in the journal proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.