Commercialising sustainable, battery-free digital wayfinding beacons for indoor navigation

Lightricity has developed prototype light-powered, BLE-based, beacons that can replace battery-powered beacons for navigation in digital wayfinding solutions. These solutions typically pair beacon devices located throughout buildings with a smart phone and mapping app to enable the user to navigate indoors around large buildings e.g. hospitals, museums, airports, shopping centres and office complexes. The main current constraint on wider adoption of these navigation solutions is that the beacons require a high beaconing rate (multiple times per second) to provide enough resolution of location data to moving people. This drives high demand on the batteries which typically last 6-12 months bringing high maintenance costs and significant environmental impact of battery waste and carbon impact of battery change activities. Our solution replaces the battery with an energy harvesting solution based on our patented indoor photovoltaic (PV) technology and power management architectures giving a maintenance-free and much more sustainable option.

The light-powered beacons (4EverNav) are based upon adaptations to our already deployed light-powered asset-tracking tags (4EverTrack) which enable entirely battery-free operation. In a current 'Circular Economy for SMEs' project we have been focussed on exploring the feasibility of a range of approaches to further reduce the environmental impact of these products. Amongst these, some technical developments have enabled the spin-off benefit of enabling us to meet the requirements to deliver wayfinding beacon functionality with a very similar architecture.

This project aims to overcome barriers to commercial adoption by carrying out a pilot with a wayfinding solution customer to validate performance. We will also address wider compatibility across different smart phone operating systems and ensure that the devices are designed compliant with the requirements for both CE and FCC certification in order to be accepted in the main global markets. Support with design for manufacture will ready us to progress to a commercial solution post-project.