What limits the battery life of a pendant-style always-on audio wearable?
research/ambient-wearable
What limits battery life in a pendant-style always-on audio wearable: stylised nRF52840-class power model (mic floor ~170 h; speech-gated ~105 h vs 59 h always streaming) plus a 74-byte VAD gate that compiles for Cortex-M4; no hardware measured
What it found
A stylised average-current model for an nRF52840-class pendant with a 150 mAh cell, built from a few vendor figures read on 2026-10-13 plus labelled assumptions. The always-on microphone is the floor (about 170 h alone); gating codec and radio on speech at a 30% speech fraction gives about 105 h against 59 h for always streaming. A 74-byte energy-gate routine compiles for Cortex-M4. Nothing is measured on hardware, the datasheets were not read in full and there is no numeric comparison with Omi.
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.