Is This the Future of Indoor IoT Power?

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Hello readers!

This week we’re talking about LED-based optical power, building smarter cities with LoRaWAN, how global IoT connectivity transforms smart farming, and more!

Let there be power

One of the quiet constraints in IoT has nothing to do with connectivity, compute, or sensors. It’s power. Whether it’s a smart building loaded with environmental monitors or a factory lined with asset tags, cables limit placement and batteries require constant maintenance. That’s why makes new fidnings from the Institute of Science Tokyo is a compelling glimpse into a different future. The researchers unveiled the world’s first automatic, adaptive optical wireless power system. Will it change how indoor IoT is powered in the years ahead?

The breakthrough comes from combining safe, LED-based optical power with a control system that can actively find, track, and deliver energy to multiple nearby IoT devices. Most optical wireless power work until now has revolved around lasers, which offer efficiency but raise safety concerns in indoor spaces. LEDs, by contrast, are inexpensive, eye-safe, and easy to scale, but they’ve historically struggled with distance, alignment, and ambient lighting. The Science Tokyo team tackled those limitations head-on by making the entire system adaptive: the beam focuses itself, aims itself, and switches intelligently between “bright room” and “dark room” modes depending on the environment.

At the core is a clever blend of optics and lightweight computer vision. A tunable liquid lens adjusts the focus automatically, keeping the beam tight no matter where the receiver is positioned. A depth camera locates each photovoltaic receiver and confirms where the beam hits, while a compact AI model helps the system identify devices even when lighting conditions change. The result is a setup that can sequentially power multiple receivers at different distances—up to about five meters—without user intervention and without interruption.

For IoT professionals, the real story is the potential downstream impact. A safe, room-scale optical power layer could eventually support sensors, tags, wearables, digital signage, and other low-power devices without wiring or battery swaps. Retail environments could maintain electronic shelf labels without worrying about battery life. In factories, tool tags, condition monitors, or mobile indicators could operate freely without cables dictating placement.

There are limitations: range, line-of-sight requirements, and the need for IoT devices to integrate small PV receivers. And while this is still research, not a commercial product, the direction is worth noting: Just as Wi-Fi decoupled connectivity from cabling, adaptive optical power hints at a world where energy itself becomes a flexible, ambient layer of the environment.

And you’ll never trip over a power cable again.

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