Sony intros 'power efficient' step counter sensor for Xperia

Sony has included a sensor co-processor on several of the latest Xperia devices, including Xperia Z2. This sensor co-processor makes it possible to continuously collect data in the background, without using the main application processor. According to a Sony blog post, this will enable up to ten times lower power consumption when using always-on features in sensors, compared to a system without a sensor co-processor. In the supported Xperia devices, Sony currently uses the sensor co-processor for a step counter sensor type, which will let apps tracks the user’s steps in the background at all time. Sony Xperia Z2, Xperia Z2 Tablet, and prior Xperia devices running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 Quad-core 2.2Ghz CPU platform (Xperia Z1, Xperia Z1 Compact, and Xperia Z Ultra) features a low-power sensor co-processor (dubbed ‘sensor sub-system’). This component enables the possibilities of running always-on sensor features, without having a significant impact on the power consumption, Sony says. Sony used a digital multimeter to measure the power consumption on Xperia Z2 with the sensor co-processor, while running a pedometer application.

Apple claims that this split brings with it two significant advantages over the current single sensor camera setup used by smartphones. The first is that each of the two sensors is thinner than the comparable single sensor able to capture both luma and chroma data, which means that phones and tablets themselves can be made thinner. The second is an improved signal-to-noise ratio that spells cleaner-looking images.

We’d be surprised if this split-sensor technology is used in the next iPhone (the iPhone 6, if it’s indeed called that, is probably only a few months away), but it could certainly make its way into future iterations of Apple’s smartphone, tablet and notebook products.

The demo showed that the power consumption is minimal compared to a device without the sensor co-processor. In the supported Xperia devices, Sony currently uses the sensor co-processor for a step counter sensor type, which will let apps tracks the user’s steps in the background at all time. The step counter is a "composite sensor", meaning that it is a derivate of one, or more, underlying Carbon Dioxide Sensor hardware components. In the case of Xperia devices, the accelerometer sensor hardware is used for the step counter sensor type. A composite sensor, in this case the step counter, also includes an accompanied computational algorithm which extracts the user’s steps out of the sensor data. On the newly released Xperia Z2, customers can start utilising the power efficient step counter CO2 Sensor type in their applications. For Sony Xperia Z Ultra, Xperia Z1 and Xperia Z1 Compact, the support for the step counter sensor type is implemented through the Android 4.4 update.

Sony used a digital multimeter to measure the power consumption on Xperia Z2 with the Humidity Sensor co-processor, while running a pedometer application.