Sweat-sipping wearable aims to charge electronics without couch potatoes lifting a finger Brainiacs at UC San Diego say they have created a wearable designed to turn your horrid sweaty hands into a charge for your electronic devices – while you barely have to lift a finger. "We envision that this can be used in any daily activity involving touch, things that a person would normally do anyway while at work, at home …
We sweat to maintain our body temperature, so anything that slows down the evaporation, or moves it to a place where it isn't cooling the body (I'm assuming that they are not literally preventing evaporation, just delaying it while the electrochemistry happens, or you'd have to drain the stale sweat from the device each day) will cause a rise in temperature, more sweating, and, in extreme cases, heat exhaustion.
I'm also marvelling at someone who looks at a gym and thinks, "we must generate energy from the sweat", rather than, "why don't we stick a dynamo on all those exercise machines". Sure, it's innovative, but there's some low-hanging fruit there. Seriously, why isn't there a chain of Green Gyms that rate your workout by KWh delivered to the National Grid?
I've wondered about that myself... but then, we live in world where people fight for the parking spaces closest to the gym entrance, and use an escalator to avoid the stairs to the door.
And now we are offered a system to generate power from our bodies without lifting a finger... oh, wait, all those keypresses?
"We sweat to maintain our body temperature, so anything that slows down the evaporation, or moves it to a place where it isn't cooling the body (I'm assuming that they are not literally preventing evaporation, just delaying it while the electrochemistry happens, or you'd have to drain the stale sweat from the device each day) will cause a rise in temperature, more sweating, and, in extreme cases, heat exhaustion."
Why would it be any different from wearing a normal watch in that respect? Watches do prevent some sweat evaporation, and need cleaning because of that, but you'd have to be in some pretty extreme conditions for that to be the thing that pushes you over into heat exhaustion.
"I'm also marvelling at someone who looks at a gym and thinks, "we must generate energy from the sweat", rather than, "why don't we stick a dynamo on all those exercise machines". Sure, it's innovative, but there's some low-hanging fruit there. Seriously, why isn't there a chain of Green Gyms that rate your workout by KWh delivered to the National Grid?"
Their argument is that the energy generated as a proportion of work done is higher, but I'm not sure that's particularly relevant. If I'm doing 200W of exercise and you leech 1W of that, it might only be 0.5% of the work, but it's still 1W. If I'm typing on a keyboard using an you're able to generate 6000% more energy than I'm using to type, that's great as a proportion, but it's still only 0.5mW.
That said, I can see the use. A watch that never needs charging or battery replacements is a good idea. My watch has a solar panel in it, my Mum's old watch charges off mechanical motion, but there's always a place for some new idea that does the job in a different way. In particular, this method seems to work simply by the act of wearing it, which is what watches are designed to do, and doesn't rely on you moving around a sufficient amount or getting out in the Sun enough. Which could be useful for other applications where that can be difficult. A diabetic friend has an implant to dispense insulin, which does get Sun and doesn't necessarily jiggle around that much, but is necessarily always in contact with skin.
So sure, a gym could certainly generate a lot more energy by attaching dynamos to all the fake bikes (I believe many such things are self powered using exactly such a system these days). But the tricky bit has always been getting that energy to where it's wanted. A watch that charges simply by being worn will be more attractive to many people than one that requires you to plug it into a treadmill for 30 minutes.
I guess that in this instance "HH" means "Helly Hansen", which is a Norwegian brand of outdoor clothing. They apparently got a reputation for, over time and despite thorough cleaning, emitting a horrible stink once they started to get sweaty. I hear their newer products use different materials which don't suffer from this (as much).
Not sure I want to know where OP sticks his fingers though, if his fingertip plasters smell that bad after a couple of days.
strapping an electrical device to my privates
For some reason that recalled to my mind the scene in Tom Sharpe's Indecent Exposure where the (South African) police constables are given aversion therapy to stop them fraternizing with the native girls - by strong electric shocks delivered every time they get aroused, as a carousel of attractive females is shown on the slide projector.
Which goes awry when the person in charge of loading the slide projector accidentally loads it with his holiday snaps from a safari trip - leading to the immortal line from one of the constables, something like "Please god no, I swear I'll never look at another giraffe again!!!"
Really must re-read that book. It's been 30+ years and I'm sure I've misremembered the details.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
