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October 06, 2004
Human power - is it in you?
Every now and then, you read an article about how Nike and Reebok and suchlike companies are working on various types of energy-return shoes and features.
Lately, we've been given glimpses by Adidas of a new shoe (this Christmas, they say)
with battery-powered dynamic computer-controlled microadjustment capability, that adapts to each of your strides to make it as energy-efficient as possible.
Then we see the occasional story about how the energy of walking could be used to power small microcomputers on or in our bodies.
But none of these efforts addresses what to me is so obvious, in terms of using our bodies for power: namely, the unceasing beating of our hearts.
The fact that we can record an EKG
.
tells us that there is electrical activity in the heart: after all, that's what an EKG is, literally: an ElectroCardioGram (the K instead of C is because it was invented and perfected by a German, thus Kardio).
Each heartbeat produces power, wasted as heat.
Why not figure out a way to absorb and store this power, non-invasively?
That way, you don't have to be walking or running to create energy; all you have to be is alive.
October 6, 2004 at 06:01 PM | Permalink
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Comments
As far as the electricity that your heart generates goes, it is actually a tiny amount of energy. The fact that it takes a giant amplifier (the machine reading the EKG) to pick it up pretty much rules it out as useable power. The electrical impulses in the body are used for control, not for power. Movement in the body is created using chemical energy stored in molecules in the cells. When you hear in "The Matrix" that the human body generates 100 watts of electrical energy, or whatever, they don't tell you that most of that is used for carrying nerve impulses around the body and brain. Without tht voltage potential (like, if you attached an MP3 player or something) your brain would pretty much stop working, and your muscles would stop beating. Basically bad buisness.
The same thing goes for that "wasted" heat. Our bodies are so efficient that they are designed so that the reactions that they use to keep running rely on the waste heat at the end (which is why we're warm blooded) If you've ever had hypothermia, you know what it's like to take that waste heat out of the equation :)
A much more realistic use of human power is to let our muscles make movement (since they are pretty efficient at it) and use some of it to power electronics. Piezo Electrics like these ones:
http://www.idfuel.com/index.php?p=8&more=1&c=1
are one way to pull it off.
Posted by: Dominic | Oct 7, 2004 4:32:24 PM
Funny - I believe that shoe was developed at MIT by a guy that was on my triathlon team (Dr. Kim Blair). I almost got to do some "alpha" testing of the shoe about 2.5 years ago.
Posted by: fat kid | Oct 6, 2004 7:25:24 PM
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