They say that walking can be one of the best forms of exercise, and do you happen to agree with that particular assessment? If you say so, then you might be interested in what this particular group of students who happen to hail from Rice University have managed to come up with – a new kind of shoe energy harvester which will use the amount of energy gathered to power medical devices.
It makes plenty of sense in this day and age, especially when you consider how medical devices at the moment (as well as in the future, no doubt about it) will start to be more power hungry courtesy to a rash of new capabilities that are being introduced. You can more or less say that lithium ion batteries have arrived at a plateau, so there must be a better way of doing things to power hungry devices as and when required. How about harnessing the body’s motion to produce useful electric power? Granted, the amount of energy harvested is not going to be much through walking, and neither is this idea new, but the invention known as PediPower was capable of producing approximately 400 milliwatts in laboratory tests, which should be adequate to charge a battery for some limited applications.