Stretchy Wearable Operates on Just Body Heat

UW researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics. Watch this video to learn more.

“I had this vision a long time ago,” said senior author Mohammad Malakooti  , UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “When you put this device on your skin, it uses your body heat to directly power an LED. As soon as you put the device on, the LED lights up. This wasn’t possible before.”

Transcript

00:00:02 This is one of the greatest things about it. You can actually use it to power an LED and it showed that now it's ready for practical applications. This is a stretchable electronic device designed to convert body heat into electricity. What you see here is that we attach one of those devices that we made, and it's connected to an LED right here. Now, it's directly powering the LED with my body. There's no battery. There's no other energy storage devices.

00:00:45 This wasn't possible before. This device has rigid semiconductors inside that do the energy conversion, so they convert heat to electricity. Or it also offers on-demand heating and cooling. So when you supply power, one side is going to get hot. The other side is going to get cold. We can use it for different applications but we designed it for the human body. You can bend it like this. You can twist it, stretch it, anything that you want

00:01:20 and it still functions. It can be applied to a wide range of applications. For example, we can use this at data centers. The computers get really hot. Any situation that you are generating excess heat we can use that energy and power small electronics. My goal is to use this technology to develop self-sustainable electronics, like self-powered wearables that do not require constant change of battery

00:01:53 or maintenance. The best part is this is one size fits all. Incredible!