How Long Will My Phone Battery Last?

TL;DR

This paper introduces V-Health, a low-cost, user-level battery health estimation service for mobile devices that uses battery voltage data to accurately assess battery degradation, enhancing device safety and user experience.

Contribution

We propose V-Health, a novel battery SoH estimation method based solely on voltage, validated through extensive empirical measurements and real-world testing on various mobile devices.

Findings

V-Health achieves less than 5% error in SoH estimation.

Extensive measurements over 72 months on 15 batteries support the method.

V-Health enables four new user-centric applications.

Abstract

Mobile devices are only as useful as their battery lasts. Unfortunately, the operation and life of a mobile device's battery degrade over time and usage. The state-of-health (SoH) of batteries quantifies their degradation, but mobile devices are unable to support its accurate estimation -- despite its importance -- due mainly to their limited hardware and dynamic usage patterns, causing various problems such as unexpected device shutoffs or even fire/explosion. To remedy this lack of support, we design, implement and evaluate V-Health, a low-cost user-level SoH estimation service for mobile devices based only on their battery voltage, which is commonly available on all commodity mobile devices. V-Health also enables four novel use-cases that improve mobile users' experience from different perspectives. The design of V-Health is inspired by our empirical finding that the relaxing voltages of a device battery fingerprint its SoH, and is steered by extensive measurements with 15 batteries used for various commodity mobile devices, such as Nexus 6P, Galaxy S3, iPhone 6 Plus, etc. These measurements consist of 13,377 battery discharging/charging/resting cycles and have been conducted over 72 months cumulatively. V-Health has been evaluated via both laboratory experiments and field tests over 4-6 months, showing <5% error in SoH estimation.