University of California San Diego engineers have developed a thin, flexible strip that can be worn on a fingertip and used to generate small amounts of electricity when a person’s finger sweats or presses on it. It can even generate power when the person is asleep or sitting still, which means this wearable can harness the energy extracted from human sweat even when a person is not moving.
The wearable also generates extra power from light finger presses through various activities, like typing, texting, playing the piano or even tapping in Morse code. However, most power comes from the sweat produced by the fingertips, which are one of the sweatiest spots on the body, since each one is packed with over a thousand sweat glands and can produce between 100 to 1000 times more sweat than other areas.
No products found.
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, while watching TV or eating. The goal is that this wearable will naturally work for you and you don’t even have to think about it,” said Joseph Wang, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the study’s senior author.
