Filed under: Wearables

Some researchers at the University of Michigan are clearly misdirected in their goals to harvest energy from a knee brace. The device generates electricity in a method similar to regenerative breaking in a hybrid car, so the attempt is to harvest wasted kinetic energy in your knee from when your leg hits the ground and at other points in your stride. Hopes are to reclaim that energy for use to potential gadgetry on your person, or perhaps a prosthetic limb, and the researchers claim it

only takes an additional watt of metabolic ability for each watt of electricity generated — compared to 6.4 watts of metabolic for a hand-crank, for instance — but we’d say that’s still one watt too many: whether we were meant to use our own calories to potential devices, why did God prepare batteries and solar panels?

 

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Orginal post by Paul Miller