The Human Battery: Powering Gadgets From The Human Body! Human Electricy - Human Energy Power

Technology has always been intimately linked to the human body. From sharpened flint to smartphones, we’ve been carrying our inventions for millennia—but the relationship is about to get even closer. The next generation of electronic devices might not just be near our bodies, they could be powered by them. Staying alive guzzles energy. In order to keep us ticking, our bodies need to burn between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day, which is conveniently enough to power a modestly used smart phone. So if just a fraction of that energy could be siphoned, our bodies could in theory be used to run any number of electronic devices, from medical implants to electronic contact lenses—all without a battery in sight. Recently, researchers have taken important strides toward unlocking this electric potential. The energy in our bodies exists in various forms. Most of them need some manipulation before they can be used to power an electronic device. But not all do. For instance, the ears of mammals contain a tiny electric voltage called the endocochlear potential (EP). Found inside the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear, the EP aids hearing by converting pressure waves into electrical impulses. It’s vanishingly weak—about a tenth of a volt—but still strong enough, in theory, to power hearing aids and other aural implants. Harvesting the EP had long been considered unthinkable due to the extreme sensitivity of the inner ear. But using a combination of surgical prowess and technological innovation, researchers in Massachusetts managed to do just that in 2012. The team developed an “energy harvester chip,” about the size of a fingernail, which was designed to extract electrical energy directly from the EP. They tested the chip in a guinea pig, implanting it into the animal’s inner ear where it generated enough electricity to power a radio transmitter. The minute electric power produced by the chip—about a nanowatt (a billionth of a watt)—is still about a million times too low to power an electronic implant. But it’s a nanowatt more than had been generated before, making this an important proof-of-concept. Other methods of generating electric energy from the body that are still in developement includes implants that break down you blood sweat and even tears to produce a charge. While this technology could potentially be helpful in medical implants, we have to recognize that in a monetized system there could be unwanted results for the general population, when you turn the human body into a battery.