Now, smartphone app that illuminates power consumption

Washington, Nov 21 (ANI): A new application has been developed which can help check the power being consumed by applications loaded on smartphones.

Students and professors at the University of Michigan have developed application called Power Tutor for the Android smartphone that can help show users and software developers how much power their applications are consuming.

Lide Zhang, a developer of the product and a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said: "Today, we expect our phones to realize more and more functions, and we also expect their batteries to last. PowerTutor will help make that possible."

PowerTutor can show in real time how four different phone components use power: the screen, the network interface, the processor, and the global positioning system receiver.

To create the application, researchers disassembled their phones and installed electrical current meters.

Then they determined the relationship between the phone's internal state (how bright the screen is, for example) and the actual power consumption.

That allowed them to produce a software model capable of estimating the power use of any program the phone is running with less than 5 percent error.

The work, supported by Google and the National Science Foundation, was done in collaboration with the joint University of Michigan and Northwestern University Empathic Systems Project. (ANI)