Remember when the first smartwatches were ridiculed for needing to be charged almost every night? Although the situation has improved significantly, the fact remains that they still need to be taken off your wrist and put on a charger every now and then. That might sound only like a hassle for smartwatches and wireless earbuds, but imagine the discomfort and risks of having to remove health monitors, not to mention devices like pacemakers whose batteries also need to be replaced regularly.
They might be called “wearables,” but these devices are nothing like their analog counterparts, that don’t cause stress. Then again, they don’t offer features either, so it’s not exactly a fair trade. Solving the battery problem will go a long way in making these devices more sustainable and accessible, and this ongoing research is trying to do just that by removing batteries from these devices completely.
Designers: Andy Kong, Daehwa Kim, Chris Harrison (Power-Over-Skin)
Electrical devices need power to function, of course, and the most straightforward method is to have a battery inside them. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that these devices are thicker and heavier than they could be, and they have to be recharged or have their batteries replaced every so often. If you could power the devices without a battery or without even a cable, that could go a long way in shrinking their sizes down and potentially making them more fashionable.
The trick is to hide the actual power source somewhere on your body and then use your body itself as the conduit for electrical power to travel to these “wearable” devices. This can, for example, be used to make earrings with flashing LEDs or a ring with a joystick that can control your smart TV. These devices need to be touching your skin to actually get power, but considering their use cases, that won’t be much of a problem.
Although the previous examples do sound contrived and a little ridiculous, the applications for this technology go beyond mobile accessories. Health sensors, like a skin-based thermometer or glucose monitor, can be stuck to any part of your body and work almost infinitely, at least as long as there’s a power source attached to you. You can even have a calculator that powers up when you hold it in your hand, or a phone case that charges your phone bit by bit while you’re using it.
Power-Over-Skin does still require some transmitter to send power to those devices through your skin, so we can’t exactly escape the need for batteries just yet. The devices are also quite unappealing, which is as expected of prototypes. Hopefully, there will be further research in improving not only the design of the wearables but also their ability to get power through other means, maybe from the abundant air around us.
