New Technology Uses Human Skin to Charge Smartwatches

Smartwatches have become helpful with multiple additional features. New research found a solution to eliminate the need for external charging by making human skin conduct power to charge these useful wearables.

Smartwatches have become widely popular as they come with extremely useful features, including health monitoring. The main reason why some users discontinue their use is the need to charge the on-device battery frequently. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found a real-world solution that helps solve this problem.

"Quality of sleep and its patterns contain a lot of important information about patients' health conditions," says Sunghoon Ivan Lee, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences.

Novel Smartwatch Technology to Help Track Heart Rate
Novel smartwatch app displays electrical activity of the heart and notifies patients with AFib if their heart rhythm is normal or indicative of AFib.

‘The newly-designed wearables got 0.5 - 1 milliwatt (mW) of direct current (DC) power from the instrumented objects via the human skin. Contact with this amount of electricity is safer as per the regulations proposed by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP).’

This rationale made him and his team look for a solution that can eliminate the need for mere disconnection of smartwatches from users' bodies during sleep times.

Human skin as a conductor

Lee joined hands with UMass Amherst wearable computing engineer Jeremy Gummeson and arrived at a plan of instrumenting daily objects, such as the office desk, chair, and car steering wheel, so that they can charge up any wearable device while the users interact with them.

Smartwatch Tracks Drug Levels for Personalized Medicine
Custom smartwatch which can detect drug levels in the body by measuring sweat has been developed. The technology can offer personalized treatments for individuals.

Gummeson explains, "In this device, we have an electrode that couples to the human body, which you could think of as the red wire if you're thinking of a traditional battery with a pair of red and black wires."

The main idea behind this technology is to use human skin itself to charge any wearables that come into its contact.

Quiz on Sleep Disorder
The comfort of modern life comes at the cost of restful sleep! "Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone-Anthony Burgess" Scientifically it is proven that a good night's sleep is imperative for maintaining a balance between the physical, emotional and behavioral well-being of a person.

Safer yet effective power transfer

They established the conventional black wire between two metal plates on a wearable device and an instrumented everyday object. This object can now become virtually connected with the device when the frequency of the energy carrier signal is as high as hundreds of megahertz (MHz) range.When they tested this prototype with ten people when they worked on a desktop keyboard or a laptop, or as they were holding the steering wheel of a car, they observed a transfer of approximately 0.5 - 1 milliwatt (mW) of direct current (DC) power occurred.

About Sleep Disturbances
The physical, emotional and hormonal changes that occur in women during puberty, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause can cause Sleep Disturbances

"You can think of the amount of power that gets transmitted by our technology as roughly comparable to what's transmitted through the human body when you stand on a body composition scale, hence poses minimal health risks," Gummeson says. This is way beyond the frequency range that the human can actually perceive," highlighted the researchers, regarding the safety of this technology.

The team received a grant of $598,720 from the National Science Foundation to develop their design further. They also published a paper regarding this breakthrough invention in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies .

Although the prototype cannot produce enough power to fuel any sophisticated devices, Mohammed, the lead author of the research, says, "I am hopeful that this will open a lot of possibilities toward the development of battery-less wearable devices both for consumer and clinical applications."

Source-Medindia