Communication among devices has served the aim of enabling cooperative behaviors as reactions to external stimuli or events, from evaluation of alerts to concerned actions following changes of enviromental conditions. The 4IR builds on the IoT paradigm, as it relies upon the scenario of having billions of interconnected autonomous mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity and access to knowledge. While enabling such massive deployment, the 4IR should be increasingly eco-friendly. The 4IR is a disrupting approach that will force companies in almost every domain to re-organize themselves in a more efficient way, by exploiting technological breakthroughs such us artificial intelligence , wireless communication and quantum computing. The integration of these emerging technologies into every day life requires efficient power supply solutions in computing, sensing, memory enlargement and human-machine interaction. Connected devices may be simple sensing nodes in a network or may be sensing and actuating elements of complex nets, and are further deployed in most diverse fields, from medical diagnostics to security, from predictive maintenance to environmental safety (ambient and infrastructure monitoring) and from industrial automation to intelligent transportation systems till many kinds of daylife activity. One perceived bottleneck for 4IR is that in most situations, IoT devices/networks will be remotely deployed, so that maintenance may be either incovenient or impossible. Consequently, a foundational aspect for the successful deployment of 4IR is that IoT nodes operates maintenance-free over their whole predicted lifetime. In particular, this implies that IoT devices either have to embed energy sources consistent with their operative lifespan or that clean and renewable energy convertors, if working off-grid, must sit on board. The energy convertors allow scavenging energy from different sources: mechanic (piezoelectric phenomenon), light (photovoltaic effect), thermic (Seebeck effect) or electromagnetic .
NANO-EH has the ambitious vision of creating a pathway for translating forefront knowledge of unique high frequency properties of emerging classes of energy harvesting nanomaterials into advanced device engineering for scalable miniaturized energy harvesting/storage submodules that are tailored for the specific needs of stand-alone, mobile or portable uses in 4IR, Connected Heath and mobile telecommunication application.
