KAIST has invented a flexible, bendable technology that will help here

Apr 24, 2014 06:56 GMT  ·  By

Wearable gadgets currently work off energy provided by a battery, but there's a lot of room for improvement, and their shapes and sizes should evolve too, so KAIST decided to come up with a way of powering such items via body heat.

Turning heat into electricity and vice-versa is one of the most common energy transformations in nature and human creations alike.

And since body heat is always a constant for us humans, as it is for all (well, most) mammals, it was to be expected that it would, finally, be pegged as a resource at some point. Like solar power and wind power really.

Truth be told, we think that as soon as someone figures out how to embed solar cells in clothing fabrics, that will become the primary way of powering wearable electronics and cyber clothing.

The sun is an inexhaustible energy source after all, and there's only so much electricity that body heat can help produce, even when you're jogging or performing some other physically demanding activity.

Then again, there's nighttime and bad weather to consider, so we guess that, eventually, the ideal piece of clothing and wearable gadgetry will be invented, with both sun-based and body heat-based energy generation.

It's the latter that KAIST is looking into, having created an ultra-thin, flexible and bendable thermoelectric technology.

Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology took a thermoelectric generator and printed it on a thin glass fabric using a screen printing technique.

Compared to other thermoelectric generators, it is ten times more powerful while being very, very light because it doesn't need an upper and lower substrate. The glass fabric plays both those roles.

That's a big achievement, definitely in a league of its own. We've seen bendable electronics before, but it's one thing to have a flexible Printoo Arduino Module and another to have actual fabric that can turn body heat into electricity.

If KAIST managed to refine its technology and get gadget and clothing makers to try it out, we might see a new race of wearable electronics devices in less than a decade.

This type of electronics would not need to have a means of recharging the battery because the simple act of wearing them would be enough to restore it, constantly. And if clothing designers adopt the thermoelectric fabric, the concept could be applied even to more demanding devices, like augmented reality eyewear (Google Glass) and gaming headsets (Oculus Rift).