Your Body Could Soon Become a Battery for Wearable Electronics

Everything is energy—and now, apparently, we might soon be able to use our own energy to charge wearable watches.

That’s right. Eventually, we will likely use our own bodies as batteries for wearable devices. While 6G is still in its development stage, the future wireless communication technology is expected to launch by 2030, making all of this possible in the semi-near future. Once we can utilize 6G telecommunications, we could potentially “harvest the waste energy from Visible Light Communication (VLC) by using the human body as an antenna,” according to researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“VLC is quite simple and interesting,” said Jie Xiong, professor of information and computer sciences at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “Instead of using radio signals to send information wirelessly, it uses the light from LEDs that can turn on and off, up to one million times per second.” 

The “antennas” on our human bodies would be simple coiled copper wires that would collect the leaked radio frequencies. Basically, the wire’s energy recycling is supercharged when it comes into contact with human skin. 

Now, researchers have developed Bracelet+, a coil of copper wire that you can wear as a bracelet on your upper forearm. Developers noted that you can wear it on other parts of your body, like as a ring or an anklet, but it might not be as efficient.

“The design is cheap—less than fifty cents,” the authors stated. “But Bracelet+ can reach up to micro-watts, enough to support many sensors such as on-body health monitoring sensors that require little power to work owing to their low sampling frequency and long sleep-mode duration.”

This all seems a little too futuristic for my taste. Also, given the state of the world right now, I think most of us are more interested in discovering a device that could charge our energy rather than the other way around.

But still—this is pretty interesting data.

“Ultimately, we want to be able to harvest waste energy from all sorts of sources in order to power future technology,” said Xiong.