I just saw this linked on Reddit and thought you all might be interested.
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Interesting. I would love to know the more technical side of how they’re able to use the human body to transmit power.
Well now I’m going to have to buy the article, because none of the abstracts explain shit about what they’re doing.
I also love the constant references in these papers about wearables and IoT sensors to harvesting EM noise “from the environment” as a free energy source like it’s magic. The energy has to come from somewhere, and there will be repurcussions.
- if you harvest energy from electric signal in the environment (say WiFi) then those transmitted signals that had a purpose will be either absorbed or will come through at reduced decibels, resulting in lost packets
- if you harvest energy from magnetic fields in the environment (by far the most efficient source of ambient power that I see referenced constantly) then you’re sapping power through someone’s electricity meter.
There’s not a cloud of useless noise all around us that can be distinguished from the useful signals (except maybe cosmic rays). It just doesn’t work like that. People don’t get it though, as you can see from the 5G microchip people thinking their government tracking chips can be powered by magic hate beams or something.
What is going to happen is: enterprising startup companies are going to be misled into thinking this is a viable power source for their product, they’ll start releasing millions of these parasitic devices into our environment, and users will demand more than the devices were intended for, sapping legitimate signals in the process.
It’s gonna start an EMI arms-race as big businesses start over-engineering their products to avoid parasitizing, and the energy harvesting chips get more and more sophisticated.
Tip for you, contact one of the researchers, most of the time they will give you a copy as they don’t actually get any money from the sites selling acces (journals etc).
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I read some things about this a while ago. Took me a while to find where we posted it.
This was my post from before I changed my name
Very cool stuff, energy harvesting. I don’t imagine taking ambient energy from the environment will really amount to much usable power. Borrowing some heat or electrical energy from the human body would make a lot more sense.
~ Jamie