VIDEO: FUTURISTIC BATTERY-FREE CELLPHONE IS STILL A CONCEPT, BUT IT WORKS!

The first ever battery-free cellphone presented to you by the University of Washington's engineers. The battery-free cellphone consumes only a few microwatts of power and the design can sense speech, actuate the earphones and switch between uplink and downlink communication, all in real time. 

The concept and system are developed by researchers from the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the UW Department of Electrical Engineering. The battery-free cellphone concept optimises transmission and reception of speech while simultaneously harvesting power which enables the battery-free cellphone to operate continuously. The battery-free cellphone takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone's microphone or speaker that occurs when a person talks into a phone or listens to a call. 

An antenna connected those components converts that motion into changes in standard analogue radio signal emitted by a cellular signal base station. The processor essentially encodes the speech patterns in the reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power. The battery-free cellphone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode the speech and to receive the speech it converts the encoded radio signal into sound vibrations that are picked up by the battery-free phone's speaker. 

In the video, you will see the prototype being tested and the user presses a button to switch between these two "transmitting" and "listening" modes. The calls connect via Skype and users can start talking on this futuristic device. Watch the video to see more on the battery-free cellphone.