| Popis: |
This position paper advocates for digital sobriety in the design and usage of wireless acoustic sensors. As of today, these devices all rely on batteries, which are either recharged by a human operator or via solar panels. Yet, batteries contain chemical pollutants and have a shorter lifespan than electronic components: as such, they hinder the autonomy and sustainability of the Internet of Sounds at large. Against this problem, our radical answer is to avoid the use of batteries altogether; and instead, to harvest ambient energy in real time and store it in a supercapacitor allowing a few minutes of operation. We show the inherent limitations of battery-dependent technologies for acoustic sensing. Then, we describe how a low-cost Micro-Controller Unit (MCU) could serve for audio acquisition and feature extraction on the edge. In particular, we stress the advantage of storing intermediate computations in ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), which is nonvolatile, fast, endurant and consumes little. As a proof of concept, we present a simple-minded detector of sine tones in background noise, which relies on a fixed-point implementation of the fast Fourier transform (FFT). We outline future directions towards bioacoustic event detection and urban acoustic monitoring without batteries nor wires. |
