D. Scott, W. LaForest, H. Das, I. E. Polykretis, C. D. Schuman, C. P. Rizzo, J. S. Plank and S. Swaminathan

July, 2025

ICONS: International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems

https://iconsneuromorphic.cc/Schedule-2025/

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Abstract

The deployment of dense, low-cost sensors is critical for realizing ubiquitous smart environments. However, existing sensing solutions struggle with the energy, scalability, and reliability trade-offs imposed by battery maintenance, wireless transmission overhead, and data processing complexity. In this work, we present Vibe2Spike, a novel battery-free, wireless sensing framework that enables vibration-based activity recognition using visible light communication (VLC) and spiking neural networks (SNNs). Our system uses ultra-low-cost tags composed only of a piezoelectric disc, a Zener diode, and an LED, which harvest vibration energy and emit sparse visible light spikes without requiring batteries or RF radios. These optical spikes are captured by event cameras and classified using optimized SNN models evolved via the EONS framework. We evaluate Vibe2Spike across five device classes, achieving 94.9% average classification fitness while analyzing the latency-accuracy trade-offs of different temporal binning strategies. Vibe2Spike demonstrates a scalable, and energy-efficient approach for enabling intelligent environments in a batteryless manner.

Citation Information

Text

author     D. Scott and W. LaForest and H. Das and I. E. Polykretis and C. D. Schuman and
           C. P. Rizzo and J. S. Plank and S. Swaminathan
title      {Vibe2Spike}: Wireless, Batteryless Vibration Sensing with Event Cameras and Spiking Neural Networks
booktitle  International Conference on Neuromorphic Computing Systems (ICONS)
publisher  ACM
month      July
year       2025

Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{sld:25:vwb,
    author = "D. Scott and W. LaForest and H. Das and I. E. Polykretis and C. D. Schuman and
               C. P. Rizzo and J. S. Plank and S. Swaminathan",
    title = "{Vibe2Spike}: Wireless, Batteryless Vibration Sensing with Event Cameras and Spiking Neural Networks",
    booktitle = "International Conference on Neuromorphic Computing Systems (ICONS)",
    publisher = "ACM",
    month = "July",
    year = "2025"
}