Electricity from body heat

Making calls from a cell phone with no battery, using just the warmth of your hand? Perhaps that's no more than a pipe dream right now. But new circuits are already making it possible to harness body heat for generating electricity.

Numerous items of medical equipment are attached to the body of a patient in the intensive care ward. They monitor the heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, pulse and breathing rate. This tends to produce quite a jumble of cables, for all these devices require their own electricity supply. In future, medical sensors may be able to function without power from a wall socket. Instead, they will draw all the power they need from the warmth of the human body. The respective data will be sent by a radio signal to the central monitoring station.

In collaboration with colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM and the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM, research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen have developed a way of harnessing natural body heat to generate electricity. It works on the principle of thermoelectric generators, TEG for short, made from semiconductor elements. The TEGs extract electrical energy simply from the temperature difference between a hot and a cold environment. Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees would be required in order to generate enough power, but the differences between the body's surface temperature and that of its environment are only a few degrees.

"Only low voltages can be produced from differences like these," explains Peter Spies, manager of this sub-project at the IIS. A conventional TEG delivers roughly 200 millivolts, but electronic devices require at least one or two volts. The engineers have come up with a solution to this problem: "We combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts," says Spies. "This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat alone."

The scientists are making further improvements to this system: Circuits that are "excited" at 50 millivolts already exist. Peter Spies believes that in future, when further improvements have been made to the switching systems, a temperature difference of only 0.5 degrees will be sufficient to generate electricity.

The scientists have set their eyes on a wide range of possible applications: "Electricity can be generated from heat anyplace where a temperature difference occurs," claims Spies. "That could be on the body, on radiators to meter the heating costs, when monitoring the cooling chain during the transport of refrigerated goods, or in air conditioning systems."

Contact:
Peter Spies
Phone: +49 911 58061 6363
Fax: +49 911 58061 6398
Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen
IIS
Am Wolfsmantel 33
91058 Erlangen

For further information, please visit:
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de

Most Popular Now

Integrating Care Records is Good. Using …

Opinion Article by Dr Paul Deffley, Chief Medical Officer, Alcidion. A single patient record already exists in the NHS. Or at least, that’s a perception shared by many. A survey of...

Should AI Chatbots Replace Your Therapis…

The new study exposes the dangerous flaws in using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots for mental health support. For the first time, the researchers evaluated these AI systems against clinical standards...

AI could Help Pathologists Match Cancer …

A new study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and collaborators, suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) could significantly improve how...

AI Detects Early Signs of Osteoporosis f…

Investigators have developed an artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic system that can estimate bone mineral density in both the lumbar spine and the femur of the upper leg, based on X-ray images...

AI Model Converts Hospital Records into …

UCLA researchers have developed an AI system that turns fragmented electronic health records (EHR) normally in tables into readable narratives, allowing artificial intelligence to make sense of complex patient histories...

AI Sharpens Pathologists' Interpret…

Pathologists' examinations of tissue samples from skin cancer tumours improved when they were assisted by an AI tool. The assessments became more consistent and patients' prognoses were described more accurately...

AI Tool Detects Surgical Site Infections…

A team of Mayo Clinic researchers has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can detect surgical site infections (SSIs) with high accuracy from patient-submitted postoperative wound photos, potentially transforming...

Forging a Novel Therapeutic Path for Pat…

Rett syndrome is a devastating rare genetic childhood disorder primarily affecting girls. Merely 1 out of 10,000 girls are born with it and much fewer boys. It is caused by...

Mayo Clinic's AI Tool Identifies 9 …

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that helps clinicians identify brain activity patterns linked to nine types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, using a single...

AI Detects Fatty Liver Disease with Ches…

Fatty liver disease, caused by the accumulation of fat in the liver, is estimated to affect one in four people worldwide. If left untreated, it can lead to serious complications...

Meet Your Digital Twin

Before an important meeting or when a big decision needs to be made, we often mentally run through various scenarios before settling on the best course of action. But when...

NHS National Rehabilitation Centre to De…

The new NHS National Rehabilitation Centre will deploy technology to help patients to maintain their independence as they recover from life-changing injuries and illnesses and regain quality of life. Airwave Healthcare...