“Smart Shoes” Charge Your Devices As You Walk
Walking is great! It charges your health, and charges your devices too.
In a recent study about kinetic energy harvesting, researchers at Columbia University found that we all move around enough that a kinetic energy harvester — such as a modified Fitbit or Nike+ Fuelband — could sustain a wireless network link with other devices, such as a laptop or smartphone. And yet, energy harvesting will play a key role in the future of wearable devices.
This mid-January, a team of German researchers has built a device that will turn your shoes into “smart shoes” to help harvesting power when you walk, and then using that energy to power your smartphone. It has two separate parts: a “shock harvester” — to generate power when the shoes strike the ground — and a “swing harvester” — to produce power when the foot is swinging. “Both parts are based on the same principle: electromagnetic induction,” said Klevis Ylli, a doctoral student at the Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft Institute of Micromachining and Information Technology in Germany and lead author of the paper outlining the new energy harvesting devices.
Featuring coils of wire and magnets, these parts enable you to generate power by exploiting the motion between magnets and coils. When you wear the device while walking or running, the magnets move past the coils, causing the magnetic field within the coils to change. This changing magnetic field creates a voltage within the wire, which then can be used to power whatever electronics are embedded in the shoes. However, this may not be suitable in an industrial or service environment where shoes ought to have all the protective features. It is better to order cat work boots online or any other boots that are designed for work safety.
“Some approaches of the past have tried to use a lever underneath the shoe to power a gearbox and an electric generator as used in some electric torches. They could generate up to 250 mW, but were huge, heavy and had parts protruding from the shoe,” said Ylli.
The German’s device also has built-in navigation systems, which aims to determine how fast you’re moving, acceleration and the angles that your feet have walked. These data will then be transferred to your smartphone. A battery, also located inside the shoes, is powered by the shock harvester, and it keeps these sensors running. Another sensor for temperature has been in testing, and the results look very promising.
Currently, the energy they generate is still relatively small, around 3-4 mW at their peak. However, this breakthrough study could one day be used to create wearables that never need to be plugged into a charger. “We believe we have built comparatively small devices, considering the power output,” said Ylli.
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