A New Device Uses Human Sweat to Power Electronics

Engineers have come up with a unique product that harvests human sweat from one’s fingertips to generate power. The person does not have to lift a finger to make it work. It can still work perfectly even when the person is sleeping.

The flexible and thin strip wraps around the tip of the index finger just like a Band-Aid and then converts the chemicals present in human sweat into smaller quantities of electrical energy. Fingers tend to produce sweat constantly so that this Device can work and the person does not need to move a muscle.

Joseph Wang, a professor of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego and the co-author of a research paper describing the product, was published on Tuesday in the journal named Joule. He added that using the sweat on the fingertip that flows out naturally irrespective of where a person is sitting or what work he is doing – this technology makes a net gain available in the energy with no effort from the user.

It is pretty common for the self-powered wearable systems that depend on bioenergy harvesters to require excessive energy inputs.But because this Device does not require any physical input from the person, yet it is a step forward to making the product more practical, convenient, and easy to access every day for the person.The co-author of the study, Lu Yin, a NanoEngineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, told in a statement.