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Science Technology

Still Suits and Body-powered Devices 136

Posted by michael from the stay-out-of-the-rain dept.
Helmholtz writes: "Soon body powered devices may be a reality thanks to work being done at the Center for Space Power and Advanced Electronics, a NASA commercial center in Alabama. The article talks mostly about military and space applications, but I think it'd be really slick to make still suits, not to mention portable audio players, PDA, and even laptops that are powered by energy that we are generating anyway."
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Still Suits and Body-powered Devices

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  • but I think it'd be really slick to make still suits, not to mention portable audio players, PDA, and even laptops that are powered by energy that we are generating anyway.

    Trust me, if my computer (or PDA for that fact) were to run off the energy I make sitting at my freak'in desk, we all would be in a world of hurt.
    The only excersize I get is running to the bathroom several times after that Super BigGulp of Pepsi!
    The only other thing that gets my fingers moving fast, is seeing a new article appear on SlashDot without any postings yet! :-)

    Newt-dog

  • What if, like, all these robots and shit found out about the energy we make, and, you know, like, totally put us in these vats and stuff, and sucked all the energy out, while our minds were placed in a prison that looked exactly like reality? That'd really suck, man.

  • |energy harvesting" and urine(!) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Compact Dick ( 518888 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @04:03AM (#2640526) Homepage
    Someone needs a new PR exec :-) But from the site [watch out for the pop-unders]:

    Urine-based fuel cell: Yes, you can turn pee into power...

    ...one attractive feature of this fuel cell concept is the production of water as a by-product of the system.


    Hmmm. Somehow I won't be beta-testing the reverse-engineered water...

  • That's not new (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @04:08AM (#2640541)
    "Soon body powered devices may be a reality"

    I have a Seiko kinetic [seikousa.com] on my wrist that tells me reality goes faster than Slashdot (and tells me the time too).

    • Re:That's not new (Score:2, Informative)

      by elem ( 411711 )
      This sounds remarkably like one of the things that Trevor Bailis (inventor of the windup radio) is working on. I remember reading an article or seeing an interview where he had built a pair of boots with piezo-electric strips in which he used to recharge a mobile battery.
  • Does this still body suit need to be fused with a new form of fusion?
  • MUUAADIIIBB!

    And your body crumbles to ashes...

  • efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TH4L35 ( 310071 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @04:24AM (#2640578)
    While these cool ideas are unfortunately under-researched (according to the article), it is pretty obvious that the energy efficiency of the items you wish to power is a more important research goal than how you power them, as greater efficiency will always have a benefit, while improved energy reclamation techniques may be limited in usefulness.

    IMHO, it is better to have efficient core business operations than a business/revenue model whose excessive burn rate losses are "balanced" by millions pop-up X10 video cam ads. The former model has greater inherent stability and therefore flexibility. While the latter is just plain annoying.
    • Not to mention that efficient core business operations can't be stopped by a good configuration of Konqueror on the client side...
    • Applied Digital Solutions supposedly has this new body heat powered body availible to buy. Pretty cool little device. Supposedly they are going to be supplying it for some new watch that does all kinds of neat stuff like GPS and CDMA..

      It's called Thermo-Life. I think it's here [adsx.com].

  • When no human is present... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nsample ( 261457 ) <nsample@sta n f o r d.edu> on Saturday December 01, 2001 @04:31AM (#2640593) Homepage
    The ultimate irony is that "human powered devices" are often at a complete loss when there's no human present to power them. Some uber-entrepeneurs have actually come up with devices that provide power to human-powered devices that don't have their humans attached.


    http://chronocentric.com/watches/winders.shtml [chronocentric.com]


    All the irony involved there makes me think I should just go with a battery in the first place. =)

  • Human powered devices? Think of the Wall Street investment possibilities! With the stock price of old school bulk energy suppliers like Enron swan diving into the abyss [sltrib.com], companies that provide fuel for the human machine will skyrocket. Of all the companies that seek to power the human machine, Taco Bell has to be the most efficient source as a catalyst for human produced methane gas. IANASP (I am not a Stock Broker) but if I had some extra cash lying around, I think I would sink it into Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc [triconglobal.com] (YUM [excite.com]) -- parent company of Taco Bell and that chicken shop that supposably sells dead fried birds that never had bones, feathers or feet [unh.edu] with the mascot that reminds you of the "Good Ole Days" before the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression for you Georgia boys). One stop everyday at Taco Bell could power your PDA, Cell Phone, AbTronics Belt, GPS, IBM's Digital Photo Linux Watch, iPod and a Madonna Vougeing Aibo [nandotimes.com] via a rear mounted methane to electric converter. Plus, if Hollywood can predict the future, according to Sly Stallone's movie "Demolition Man [imdb.com]", every restaurant is going to be a Taco Bell anyway...
  • When I was a kid my father had a watch more advanced than the one my grandfather had.
    My father's watch would recharge itself by normal daily arm motions while my grandfather still winds his watch every morning.

    Recycling energy sounds good, but one could probably just move less and eat less 8)

    I'm curious to know how much energy the brain consumes and if it varies sensibly depending on the action performed.

  • I can see it now ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @05:02AM (#2640648)
    Look at that hot chick over there ... overloaded and burnt out my Visor. Damn!
  • Now the computers are *REALLY* going to look at us as food.

    We are the creator.
    The creation eats its creator.

    Man thats weird.
  • Stick with light cotton and layers in the desert. Black rubber, while quite stylish, is simply not workable.
    • Stick with light cotton and layers in the desert. Black rubber, while quite stylish, is simply not workable.

      I seem to recall that the still suits were actually a milky white (though they were black in the movie).

      Anyway, I don't cotton will help you if there is basically no water at all, ever, as it was on Arrakis.
      • In the Dune book, the Fremen also wore light
        colored robes over their stillsuits
    • ...the rubber is really made of flexible solar cells [ovonic.com].

      Power during the day, camoflage during the night.
  • A lot of technologies are thought up in sci-fi way before we ever get around to making them. I mean, they might be thought up wrong, but they're thought up. So I'm trying to figure out the earliest that this sort of idea appeared in sci-fi. A few people have mentioned the Matrix, but that's not exactly body-powered devices. The earliest I can think of is from a series called The Dungeon, edited by Farmer. And according to that, we should have all had a Baalbec A-9 last year. That's from 1988. Does anybody have anything earlier?
  • The electrostrictive polymers sound pretty cool. Not only would you be generating power for all your electronics, but you'd also stay warm and dry. I assume if it can protect you in space then it would be able to do the same here on good ol' Earth. Can you imagine it? Everybody wearing skin-tight "space-suits"? It'd be just like in the movies.... except luckily there are never fat people in movies wearing those things.

  • they forgot... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by psamuels ( 64397 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @06:25AM (#2640727) Homepage

    Here's one I didn't notice in the article. How about sucking chemical energy from blood chemicals? Basically we're talking about a dialysis-like blood filter that pulls out stuff like glucose and fatty acids and does its own cellular respiration.

    Good for controlling your weight ... diabetes ... arteriosclerosis ... but bad for maintaining high energy and preventing chronic fatigue ... hmmm, maybe it isn't such a good idea. (:

    • They also forgot about newton. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. (Yes, there is that pesky e=mc2 thing too.) So, imagine walking around in a body suit that struggles against your every move. Or running somewhere because you're late. Or...

      On the plus side, it would be excellent exercise.

    • Hmmm...that would definitely be an interesting way to power cybernetic implants, where the implant can use the same types of simple sugars that the body uses to fuel itself, perhaps via some fuel cell-like technology, to generate & store energy for its own functionality.

      It certainly would be dangerous for someone with blood sugar control problems (e.g., diabetic), although if the implant is smart enough, it might be able to _provide_ that control for someone.

      For those of us whose level of physical activity is much lower than our calorie intake, this kind of implant might be the only "practical" barrier between us & obesity :-)
      • It certainly would be dangerous for someone with blood sugar control problems (e.g., diabetic), although if the implant is smart enough, it might be able to _provide_ that control for someone.

        Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The device would not allow whatever blood chemicals it consumed (probably the glucose) to fall below a specific level.

        For those of us whose level of physical activity is much lower than our calorie intake, this kind of implant might be the only "practical" barrier between us & obesity :-)

        Sure. (:

        Of course, there is the nontrivial barrier of inventing an artificial form of cellular respiration (or other means of extracting energy from glucose) that will fit in whatever physical constraints this device needs to have.

        • Of course, there is the nontrivial barrier of inventing an artificial form of cellular respiration (or other means of extracting energy from glucose) that will fit in whatever physical constraints this device needs to have.

          Instead of trying to imitate the process of cellular respiration directly, perhaps it might be easier to build something which is fuel-cell like, converting the sugars that it scavenges from the bloodstream into electricity.

          As far as getting such an implant "hooked into" the circulatory system, I would imagine that after installation, the implant could release some of those body-hormones which cause new blood vessels to grow into the signaling tissue (the same chemical control that tumors & damaged heart tissue use to get more blood supply). God help you if the implant gets ripped out of your body though :(

          In a way, it might be good if the implant is _so_ different from the body that it doesn't have any recognizable proteins to trigger rejection from the body's immune system.

        • I know, this is so late that it probably won't ever be seen, but what the hey?

          Of course, there is the nontrivial barrier of inventing an artificial form of cellular respiration (or other means of extracting energy from glucose) that will fit in whatever physical constraints this device needs to have.

          It's been a few years since I took biology, but isn't there a step of respiration that involves electron transfer? Intercept that electron, and you've got power.

          Of course, the biggest problem would be relying on this, at least at first, as a source of major power. It wouldn't be, at first. But, merely using it as automatic, minimal-will-needed weight control would allow even crude versions to find a successful market...thus providing funds to refine it enough that one could get useable amounts of electric power out.

  • It's already here, well, kinda. (Score:4, Informative)

    by mlafranc ( 315895 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @06:26AM (#2640729) Homepage
    Seiko has been selling it's Kenetic line for a few years, even coming up with the Auto-Relay line, supposidly keeping time for up to four years.

    Seiko has the only Quartz watch of this kind, afaik.

    However, self winding watches [howstuffworks.com] have been around for quite a while. Now, these watches don't run off body heat, sweat, brain waves or any else NASA might be thinking of, god knows. They work from adjustments in tilt, giving off enough power to build a reserve. Just getting out of the office chair and going for coffee, or off the couch and walking the dog, should be enough.

    • I gave up on my last automatic wristwatch (yes, I'm just that old) after I spent a day working with a hammer drill -- poor little Timex never had a chance.
    • Self-winding watches are a neat invention that have been around for quite some time.
      The following quote comes from http://www.europastar.com/ESWatch/watchtech/automa .html [europastar.com] (via google).

      7. Who invented the automatic watch? The modern rotor system was developed and patented by Rolex and introduced into the Oyster line as the Oyster Perpetual in 1931. Emile Borer, Rolex's technical chief at the time, is credited with inventing the modern rotor system.

      The person who first developed a rotor, however, was Abraham-Louis Perrelet (1729-1826), one of Switzerland's greatest watchmakers. Perrelet is considered the father of the automatic watch. He introduced the concept in 1770 and was way ahead of his time since the invention was better suited to wristwatches. Perrelet lived in the pocket watch era and, because the watches did not move much in pockets, the rotor system did not perform so well. The rotor did not move around enough to wind the mainspring sufficiently.
      Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) improved self-winding watches; he called them "perpetuelles" (the likely source of Rolex's term). Other watchmaking greats of the 19th century advanced the concept. But it wasn't until wristwatches became popular after World War I and Rolex perfected its system that automatics came into their own.


      The neat part is that because pocket watches were so popular at the time, the self-winders didn't have much of a chance to show off their advantages.

  • ...and for an extra $30, you can get the fart-burning module which, depending on bowel volatility, can generate up to 7 extra watts an hour!
  • As long as we take care about the selection of our soliders or astronomers,
    we can tap into a very available form of energy: Methane.

    I guess I am not that much an asshole to be a solider/astronomer in the future. :-)

  • I just want a cell phone with a string you have to pull to talk.(like the talking dolls)

  • If these devices work off the energy we generate, think of how much exercise some people will get trying to power all their stuff!

    This could be the best thing for geek health since interlaced monitors were outlawed.
  • anyone here seen the matrix?
  • If you could burn as many calories by sitting on a couch powering a TV as you would by going jogging ... now that would be something.

  • I'm so excited! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BillyGoatThree ( 324006 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @10:03AM (#2640942)
    "I think it'd be really slick to make still suits..."

    That's right! Forget about flying cars, I wish for the day when I can drink tepid water harvested from my own sweat and urine!
  • This thing mainly relies on methane.

  • Not that much energy from heat (Score:4, Informative)

    by Roger_Wilco ( 138600 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @10:42AM (#2640997) Homepage

    They claim that 81W are waiting to be harvested from a sleeping human. This is incorrect, due to Carnot's law [fuelcellstore.com] (a thermodynamic law). Basically if we have a heat source at Th (the body) and a heat sink at Tl (the environment) the maximum possible efficiency is

    1- Tl/Th

    All temperatures must be in Kelvin (or Rankine). So for a human at 37C = 310K, with an environment at room temperature 20C = 293K, the best efficiency is

    1 - 293/310 = 5.5%

    If they can get 3% efficiency with current materials, they're already doing extremely well. At this efficiency a sleeping human, putting of 81W of heat, can only provide

    81W * 5.5% = 4.4W

    of usable energy. It's true that 4.4W can power a fair bit of energy-efficient technology, but they're starting with a lot less available energy than they claimed in the article.

    • Or you would have seen the following right after the 81W for a sleeping person.

      But of course there's not 100% capture. Body heat, for example, can only be converted with 3% efficiency with current thermoelectric materials.

      Strange, isn't it. It's almost as if they knew what they were talking about.

  • ...would be powered armor suits, much like they had in Starship Troopers (no, not the movie, the book by Heinlein).
    • Are you suggesting body-powered power suits, so that I would swing my arm to power the device that would swing my arms for me? Can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there's a flaw in this concept...
      • Are you suggesting body-powered power suits, so that I would swing my arm to power the device that would swing my arms for me? Can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there's a flaw in this concept...

        Why not a power suit which stores up energy until a burst of extra power is needed?

        For example, you're doing a long combat hike and you are facing a large chasm. You could use the power stored during the hike to power a super-leap via motors with little human effort. Or you could use the power stored to make a super-human burst of running speed without straining the human much.

        Though it would be better to have power packs which are charged first at the base and recharged slightly by human power and solar sources during the day when used. The concept of tapping human wasted energy (emitted body heat & motion) is limited just as increasing human exertion (like an exercise device) for power generation is. Tapping human exertion should only be used for gaining more muscle growth or as a capacitive energy store.
        • For example, you're doing a long combat hike and you are facing a large chasm. You could use the power stored during the hike to power a super-leap via motors with little human effort.

          We'll compromise -- I'll use a hand-cranked radio to call in the transport choppers, because even if I could super-leap across the chasm, I'm too old for the super-landing on the other side. :)

  • Not for me. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @11:52AM (#2641094) Journal
    I don't see why everyone things that devices that act like parasites would be cool to wear. If they are driven by the wind going by as you run, they will make it harder to run. If they are powered by the heat of your body, they will make it harder for you body to regulate its temperature (unless you live somewhere real cold). If they are powered by motion, they will make it harder to move. In short, you will have to work harder when you wear them, just as if they had a hand cranked generator.

    I fail to see why this doesn't sound like a royal pain in the end.

    -- MarkusQ

    • "everyone things" --> "everyone thinks"

      "for you body" --> "for your body"

      "real cold" --> "realy cold"

      And perhaps others. *sigh*

      Typing with my eyes closed...

      --MarkusQ

    • In most instances, I don't think this would be true. Energy would be generated through by-products of human action (heat, sweat, movement). I don't think that you would necessarily have to work any harder to generate electricity. They aren't *quite* parasites, but more like a, err, remora, existing off of the waste of something else.

      On the other hand, this could be an incentive to work. Must... Stay... At... 12 kmh... or... music.... stops!

      IceHouse

  • Somehow this topic reminds me of those old generator lights for bicycles. Anyone remember those? They made it so hard to pedal.

    I seem to recall a simpsons episode with one of those too. Was it 7G13? I can't confirm it.
    • Somehow this topic reminds me of those old generator lights for bicycles. Anyone remember those? They made it so hard to pedal.

      Not if you oiled them! They weren't all that bad when they were properly maintained. I liked them better than battery-powered lights until the flashing LED lights came out, because the batteries ran out so fast. They're still the best if you actually want a headlight that you can see by; the LEDs let you be seen, but don't illuminate much.

  • it's stilsuit. http://www.darkholmekeep.net/dune/stilsuit.cfm

    Sorry. It's one of my favorite books. Yes, books. :)

    thermowax
  • Why bother trying to harvest energy from humans when you could harvest energy from horses, pit-bulls, cheetahs, anacondas, kangaroos, dairy cows, or houseflies? Fill an square mile of Nevada with houseflies wired to a generator and feed them sewage. How many small towns would that power? PETA would have a conniption fit, but most people have no sympathy for this easily enslaved species.
    Through this logic, the Matrix can be seen as a metaphor for human domination over farm animals.
    • Cheetahs would probably work pretty good actually. They generate quite a bit of heat while running, so this device could maybe draw away the excess body heat, allowing it to continue running for quite a bit. But then we'd have to keep it well fed, and is meat a better fuel source than our present ones...?
  • Is this life imitating art, or is it fiction making accurate predictions about science?

    I am of course, talking about The Matrix. I just hope that when they start making bioelectric power plants, they use cows instead of people. ;)

  • wasteful, eh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by imaginate ( 305769 ) on Saturday December 01, 2001 @05:13PM (#2641850)
    Did anyone else think that it was ironic that the article starts out by callin the human body an "inefficient, energy-wasting machine"?

    The energy we waste is orders of magnitude below any machine that humans have built; if we were to create a machine that did half of what the human body did with current technology, I guarantee you that it would lose a helluva lot more in heat than we do.

    Besides which, the heat that we generate makes possible our ability to keep chemical reactions going that are WORTH the heat expenditure. Sure, it may be wasteful to eat a thousand calorie meal to power us for six hours, but show me an mp3 player that can power itself off something so readily available as plant material or a loaf of bread before starting to argue that our ability to convert energy from diverse sources results in a wasteful process. In other words, I'd rather be able to be omnivorous and waste a lot of that energy than to need to be powered off electricity that can only come from sources like burned fossil fuel (and we waste a HUGE amount of energy when we harness that power).

    If you ask me, the human body is remarkably EFFICIENT, because of the elements it can use for power, and because the wasted energy that is derived from those elements is minimal in comparison to the waste from, say, and Athlon processor.

    What they're ACTUALLY doing in this article is trying to harness the efficiency of the human body, not its inefficiency. It's easier to feel a soldier an extra couple of peanuts a day and let them power all their devices than it is to try to use lousy, lossy batteries to do the same work.

  • I dunno, but depending on how you harvest energy, could you start to force your body to metabolize more and lose weight? I mean, it would be uber31337 if I could lose weight by listening to MP3s, don't you think?

  • At least, proletarians are going to become useful at last.

    As I allways thought, people has the last truth.

    These days wake up our darkest side of life...
  • Stillsuits were probably popularized (dunno if the first occurance was) in the series Dune by Frank Herbert. They are body suits that collect bodily excretions, extract the water, and enable the wearer to drink the recycled water. Well-suited for living on the desert planet of Arakkis.

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