SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Battery flat on your radio? Don’t sweat it. Or maybe that’s exactly what you should do. Sweat alone has been used to power a radio for two days, demonstrating the capability of a new skin patch.
The patch is a flexible square just a couple of centimetres across that sticks to skin. It contains enzymes that replace the precious metals normally used in batteries and feed off sweat to provide power. Getting enough power out of a biofuel cell to make it useful has proved tricky, but the latest version can extract 10 times more than before.
“We’re now getting really impressive power levels. If you were out for a run, you would be able to power a mobile device,” says Joseph Wang at the University of California, San Diego, who was in the team that worked on the technology.
The creators hope the approach can be used to power wearable health sensors.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday June 24 2017, @08:49PM (1 child)
Next, chemical osmosis of electrode material causes hundreds of cases of skin cancer. Doctors can't figure it out. Lawyers do what they do best..
I think this is a useful thing. But attaching chemistry in direct contact with the system of the body is usually not a good idea.
As an example, the Apple iPhone 5S have a capacity of 5.92 Wh and a talk time of 10 hours. So the mean power consumption is circa 0.6 W. Which should be in the same ballpark as this device. It's enough for some low power electronics. But it won't be much.
(no PDP-11 will run on this....)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @12:03AM