Power Your Electronics with Sweat
How many times has it happened to you — you go to the gym, hop on the treadmill, only to find that your phone, Bluetooth headset, or MP3 player, has run out of battery. If only there was some way to power these devices through the energy you’ll be expending!
Well, researchers at the University of California San Diego are one step closer to making this a reality, with a stretchable biofuel cell that extracts energy from human sweat.

Using lithography, the engineers built a stretchy electronic foundation out of gold and screen printed a 3D carbon nanotube structure on top the anodes and cathodes. They also loaded the cell with an enzyme that oxidizes the lactic acid found in sweat to generate a current.
In order to be compatible with today’s wearable devices, the biofuel cell needs to be stretchable and flexible. Due to a novel “bridge and island” arrangement of its internal components, the cell can conform to a person’s skin without deforming the anodes and cathodes.

So far, the cell has been hooked up to a custom circuit board and used to power an LED via a person cycling on a stationary bike, but perhaps this tech could one day be used to keep your phone charged or even power safety lights while running!
You can read more about UCSD’s impressive project here, and see additional photos on the team’s Flickr album.


