Introducing LiSa: Saft’s pioneering new service

Last month, Saft launched LiSa, the world’s first predictive service for providing a reliable estimate of the remaining life of a primary lithium battery powering an IoT device.

Organizations and utility providers operating a fleet of meters, sensors or beacons have struggled with the inability to measure the remaining lifetime of batteries without taking their devices apart on a laboratory bench.

Now, they can easily get the data they need on remaining life. That means optimized asset management, more cost-effective replacement programs, and a reduced environmental footprint by ensuring devices are not taken out of service with plenty of battery life remaining.

Saft's “LiSa” service, for all your IoT devices. Click to watch

We caught up with Isabelle Sourmey, Business Applications Manager in Saft’s Connected Smart Energy Division, to ask about the development of the LiSa (Lithium Saft) service.

We introduced the LiSa service at Embedded World alongside Bluefield Engineering - an early adopter and technology partner of LiSa. And the response was great, we’ve already had discussions with people from all over the world who want to know more about LiSa and how they might deploy it.

I think that’s because we’ve developed something that answers one of the fundamental challenges facing developers in IoT. It gives people an accurate estimate and removes a lot of the guesswork from battery life prediction.

Most definitely.

I think metering is a little different because it is such an organised market, the oldest connected device market, and they’ve been grappling with this constraint of the chemistry for decades. When doing the research, we found papers from as far back as the 1980s that sought to find ways of measuring state-of-charge without dismantling a Li-SOCl₂ battery.

There are certain things that make utility providers really invested in this, whether that’s to help their operational efficiency, meet environmental targets, or stay in line with different regulations and legislations that require them to replace their meters. That’s particularly key for those using mechanical meters rather than ultrasonic meters, for example.

But the IoT market is much wider than that, and growing. We spoke to developers in other sectors and there was agreement that the lack of knowledge about remaining life in a battery is one of the biggest challenges they face. That’s not just in the industrial (IIoT) uses either, it’s a similar question for so many consumer market applications too. Wherever there’s a fleet of devices being used, this can be a great help.

It’s been a long journey! 2014 was a key point in our timeline. We were contacted by Eau de Paris, the French water utility, because they wanted to know the battery status of their fleet of meters based on the actual conditions experienced by the devices in the field - such as operating temperature, location and the quality of the connectivity network.

Fortunately, Saft have a lot of experience in modeling the predicted lifetime of primary batteries and we were already developing our Meter Life Analysis service – though it hadn’t launched at this point.

So we asked Eau de Paris to send us meters from the field and we dismantled them in the lab and undertook a huge analysis of each battery and, when we did this, we found that the lifetime model we were developing in-house was not only accurate, but far more accurate than even we expected it to be.

From there we decided to patent the lifetime model and, thanks to a program I did in 2021 with the Total Energies GRP Business Unit, we were able to do a lot of work on understanding how this model might work as a service for our customers.

So refining LiSa and getting it ready for launch has been a long process – but most definitely worth it! It was quite stressful in the weeks leading up to launch, but seeing how well it has been received makes me really proud of the work we’ve done.

LiSa is available as a subscription service for connected devices using Saft batteries. The predictive information is delivered through an Application Programming Interface (API) that is compatible with existing dashboards used by IoT fleet operators. For more information, email [email protected]