Nordic’s new software promises to predict IoT battery failures before devices go dark

Dead batteries are one of the fastest ways to turn a “smart” device into a dumb one, especially in the Internet of Things, where sensors and trackers may sit in the field for years. Nordic Semiconductor says it has a fix: a major update to its battery-monitoring software that aims to spot battery wear early and keep charge estimates accurate as cells age.

Unveiled at Embedded World 2026, Nordic’s Fuel Gauge v2.0 adds an adaptive model and a more sophisticated “state of health” readout, tools the company says can help manufacturers predict failures, schedule maintenance, and avoid unnecessary battery swaps. The timing also lines up with Europe’s new battery rules pushing products toward easier, user-replaceable batteries.

A battery gauge that learns from real-world use, not lab conditions

Battery meters often look confident right up until they’re wrong. In the real world, batteries drift: charging habits change, temperatures swing, and devices hit unexpected power spikes. Fuel Gauge v2.0 is built around an adaptive model that continuously compares a battery’s original profile with how it actually behaves over months of use.

The goal isn’t just a prettier percentage indicator. Nordic says the software is designed to keep its accuracy steadier across the product’s full life, including late-stage aging, when many estimates get unreliable. That matters for low-power IoT gear like sensors, asset trackers, and connected buttons, where an overly optimistic reading can end in a sudden shutdown, while an overly cautious one can trigger premature replacements.

Geir Kjosavik, Nordic’s product director for power management ICs, frames it as bringing the kind of battery intelligence found in premium consumer electronics to the IoT world, devices that may live outdoors, see wide temperature swings, and rarely enjoy clean, predictable charge cycles.

Nordic also acknowledges the limits: software can’t rewrite physics. If a product is poorly sized for its workload, or used in extreme conditions, an algorithm won’t perform miracles. But a model that adapts to reality can surface warning signs earlier, giving product teams time to intervene before failures pile up.

State of Health tracking turns a snapshot into a trendline

The headline feature in v2.0 is advanced battery “state of health” (SoH) estimation, added alongside the usual state of charge. Instead of treating battery status as a moment-in-time reading, SoH is meant to track long-term degradation, how much usable capacity a battery has lost as it ages.

In practical terms, a remote industrial sensor might still report 40% charge while its true capacity quietly shrinks over time. Without SoH, maintenance teams often learn the hard way, when devices start dropping offline. With a health indicator, the device can flag gradual decline, letting operators schedule service based on data rather than guesswork.

Nordic also points to devices where users swap between multiple battery packs. Fuel Gauge v2.0 is designed to track the health of each pack individually, preserving history so the system doesn’t treat every inserted battery as brand-new. That can reduce surprises when runtime suddenly collapses.

There’s a business angle, too: fewer warranty claims and fewer “no fault found” returns. Nordic argues that better health signals can help manufacturers distinguish between a dying battery and other issues. The caveat is obvious, cell quality, charging electronics, and usage conditions still dominate outcomes, but catching end-of-life batteries before they cause critical failures can pay off quickly, especially when field service costs dwarf the price of the battery itself.

nRF Cloud and Memfault aim to make battery problems visible across entire fleets

Fuel Gauge v2.0 isn’t just about what a single device reports. Nordic says the software integrates with nRF Cloud, using tooling tied to Memfault, best known in the U.S. for device observability and firmware diagnostics, to automatically collect battery metrics without companies building their own custom cloud pipeline.

For teams managing hundreds or thousands of deployed devices, that means tracking SoH, state of charge, and battery performance trends at fleet scale. Nordic says customers can slice the data by hardware revision, battery lot, geography, or usage profile, useful for spotting patterns like faster degradation in colder regions or a firmware update that accidentally increases power draw.

François Baldassari, Memfault’s founder and now Nordic’s VP of Software Services, pitches the integration as a way to give hardware-focused teams access to fleet-level insights without standing up a full observability stack from scratch.

The catch: metrics only help if they lead to action. Companies still need thresholds, alerts, and operational playbooks, or they risk drowning in dashboards. And for some organizations, deeper reliance on a specific cloud-and-software chain raises strategic questions around security, data governance, and long-term flexibility.

Built for Nordic’s low-power PMICs, but designed to run broadly

Nordic positions Fuel Gauge v2.0 as a major update for its nPM1300 and nPM1304 power management ICs, targeting low-power IoT devices where every milliamp matters and battery life is a core selling point. In that world, unstable charge estimates can force conservative behavior, like reducing transmission frequency, that directly weakens the product’s value.

Because the gauge is software-based, Nordic says it can fit a wide range of devices, from tiny sensors to more chatty connected equipment. The company also argues that better battery estimation can reduce overengineering, manufacturers may be less tempted to oversize batteries just to compensate for unreliable readings, which can matter in compact designs where saving even fractions of an inch can influence industrial design choices.

Nordic says Fuel Gauge v2.0 can run on any host MCU or wireless SoC, including its nRF54 and nRF91 families, and even on non-Nordic hosts. That opens the door to hybrid designs where companies keep existing compute or radio hardware and add smarter battery management without a full redesign.

Nordic says the software is already in beta with customers, with broader availability planned for June 2026.

Europe’s battery rules are pushing “right to repair” into product design

Nordic explicitly ties the update to the EU Batteries Regulation (2023/1542), a sweeping European law that, among other requirements, pushes portable batteries toward being easily removable and replaceable by users over a product’s lifetime. For American readers: think of it as Europe’s regulatory muscle accelerating a “right to repair” approach, forcing companies to design for serviceability, not sealed-for-life hardware.

In that environment, being able to justify a replacement becomes nearly as important as making replacement physically possible. A usable SoH indicator can guide customers and support teams with clearer messaging than a generic “low battery” warning, and can reduce returns where the battery wasn’t the real problem.

For enterprise deployments, more reliable battery health data could also reshape service contracts. If operators can better predict runtime and failure risk, they can plan maintenance windows, optimize spare inventory, and potentially make stronger uptime commitments. And if devices avoid unnecessary battery swaps, that means less waste, fewer shipments, and lower hidden costs.

The bigger implication: battery management is becoming a product feature, not an afterthought. As fleets scale and regulations tighten, the companies that can measure battery aging accurately, and act on it, may be the ones whose devices stay online the longest.