PCMAN – Have you ever had a problem with your device battery? Do you ask yourself, “Didn’t I just charged this laptop?” too many times? How familiar are you with the routine of plugging-charging-unplugging your laptop in a day? Do you constantly wish someone would work on extending devices battery lifespan?
Well good news for you, Microsoft has an ongoing research project to design a smart battery that saves up power by learning your habit of using your laptop. Researchers Ranveer Chandra, Bodhi Priyantha and Anirudh Badam are trying to make a system that understands its user’s behavior to help improve the device battery lifespan.
This research is one of the attempts of overcoming the problem that we currently have where we use our laptop for more sophisticated things that require more energy than before. People also have different needs and urgency regarding their charging habit—one might have the time to charge their device, but others might be jumping from one meeting to another, not having the privilege to find a decent power outlet to charge their devices.
Microsoft claimed that the underlying problem is that the battery is controlled by the hardware, not by the operating system. Although lithium-ion battery is already considered advance, the researchers do not think it could meet everyone’s needs. Their approach is to combine different kinds of batteries, which all are optimized to do different tasks, into the same computer. Then, it will work with the operating system to determine the most efficient battery method that should be applied to the device, considering the tasks that are currently running. Because obviously, making a video conference call requires different energy power compare to reading a Word document.
Another advance improvement that Microsoft is trying to develop is a technique used by the system to learn user’s individual habit, so it can calculate ways to extend its battery life based on the repeated activities—thus the name ‘Software Defined Batteries’.
“Even the optimization is personalized to the users’ needs,” said Anirudh Badam on the company’s blog entry.
As the research progress, the researchers stated that this method could be applied to devices further beyond laptops and tablets—eventually be applied to any device that uses a battery. We will just have to wait and see.
