Enabling energy efficient continuous sensing on mobile phones with LittleRock

Although mobile phones are ideal platforms for continuous human centric sensing, the state of the art phone architectures today have not been designed to support continuous sensing applications. Currently, sampling and processing sensor data on the phone requires the main processor and associated components to be continuously on, creating a large energy overhead that can severely impact the battery lifetime of the phone. We will demonstrate Little Rock, a novel sensing architecture for mobile phones, where sampling and, when possible, processing of sensor data is offloaded to a dedicated low-power processor. This approach enables the phone to perform continuous sensing three orders of magnitude more energy efficiently compared to the normal approaches.