Slashdot Mirror
Harvesting Energy from the Human Body
Late-Eight writes "Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on a new type of nanogenerator that could draw necessary energy from flowing blood in the human body. The hope is to incorporate the new nanogenerator into biosensors, environmental monitoring devices and even personal electronics that will require no fuel source, internal or external. Once completed, this new cellular engine could find various applications, even beyond medicine."
My laptop is running out of bloods... hmm.. Be right back, i will need refill my laptop with my bloods. bbl.
and Copper Top jokes.
In the end, this isn't just harvesting unused energy; There's no such thing. It has to come from somewhere. In this case, doesn't it come from the energy the heart is exerting to pump blood? Is it possible that this could have some long term side effects, due to slightly more stress on the heart?
coppertop ;)
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Mr. Anderson,
Welcome back! We missed you...
That's one step toward the Matrix, thanks a bunch!
Tell me where you're so that I could spot you and eliminate you in order to divert myself away from the inevitable future.
Finally a way to power animated tattoos!
I'm kind of curious; have these been verified yet?
We've been harvesting human energy for electronic use for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WatchKinetic Watch
Next step in the development - machine would feed on human blood, not only on its movement.
This post is not a matrix reference.
Dune the Stilt Suit
Hm, no mention of my idea to solve the obesity problem AND energy problem by streamlining the liposuction process so people can regularly have their body fat sucked out and used as energy...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I always wanted to be part of a electric circuit but the sockets I tried didn't feel the same way.
I'll finally have a relationship with someone. I just hope my dearest won't squeeze the life out of me.
What I get from the article is that this technology doesn't have any application today but can be used to fuel implants in the future. If the body can produce it's own energy, at least partially, that's probably better for you than having to install batteries which would otherwise be the case (and is the case now although I don't know if this an issue today).
...I can burn off the love handles by hooking them up Super Mario on my DS.
Where do I sign?
-- http://frobnosticate.com
think about, you have a portable video player loaded up with some porn. The user starts watching, the heart starts pumping faster allowing for more porn to be viewed. Repeat ad naseum(or until the user needs a towel)
Monstar L
As much as I love new medical R&D, I think this on is probably a non-starter.
First, we'll ignore the risk of infection on the assumption that we're implanting a device anyway and its just a matter of what power source we pick for the implant. The most serious general problem would be blood clots that form on surfaces of the device. These pose a sever risk if they break-off, migrate downstream and cause heart attacks, strokes, or blockages in the lungs or extremities. Even drug-eluting stents (which are coated with anti-clotting drugs) have now been found to cause clotting after the drugs dissipate from the coating.
Then there are the mechanical/hydraulic problems associated with impaired blood flow (the upstream blood pressure will need to be higher that the downstream pressue -- that pressure differential times the flow rate defines the amount of power extracted). If implanted in an artery this device will increase the back pressure on the heart (leading to an enlarged, inefficient heart) and impair circulation on downstream side (increasing problems with infections and function). If implanted in an vein this device will impair circulation on upstream side and probably lead to fluid build-up on the upstream side.
Cool idea, but I doubt it's compatible with the human body.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
To power anything of consequence you would need quite a few of these in your blood stream. Also to deliver energy to a specific device, all of these machines would have to be clustered together. Now my question is whether or not these would be a health risk. Our arteries and veins are not very big, and having a lot of nano machines in one place could cause a coronary or a heart attack. In the U.S. people already are having way to many problems with plaque buildup preventing proper blood flow. What would this do?
Are people that desperate to have their smartphone on at all times that they need to harvest the energy their heart generates to power it? Maybe that's a little drastic, but they mentioned personal electronics. Do people really need to have their devices charged by blood flow? I understand pacemakers or things of that nature because they keep you alive. If it isn't necessary, why POWER it with YOUR HEART? The fact that people even thought that is a little appalling.
622677120
I wouldn't want it inside my bloodstream. From heart valves to stents to heart bypass, we've seen how well the inside of veins and arteries preserve the blood flow without causing flow changes that lead to clotting and debris creation. We have lots to learn and engineering to do before we could put generators inside.
if had mod points, i wud mod you -1/0 {Troll,OT}
Calories = 1.163 watt-hours
So, if we assume the 1cm^3 device generates up to 4 Watts, that's 111.648 Calories / day.
That is significant when compared to the 2000 Calorie recommended by the FDA, but it might not be as siginificant when compared to the trademen, military or athletes whose bodies use much more energy in the course of the day.
Now, I don't know for sure that they'll actually insert devices this large (if they're working towards 0.5V, this would be 8A) Personally, I'm more worried about how the human body would react to the device -- would you have to supress immune response you use it? If it's in the blood, would you have issues with fatty plaque buildup?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Why couldn't this work? I see the ramifications of using the blood stream as water dam style power plant but that could have issues with the heart when it is under extreme distress. I can't see why the massive amount of heat the body produces can't be used to power these devices. At the nano level I have to believe no one will freeze to death at the minor loss in heat. As long as I don't have a bunch of tubes hooked up to my nipples, I'm all for it.....
The article may just be a fart, but I'll just gas up anyways..
... the US food industry stops polluting our diets with blood vessel clogging poisons like HFCS and such.
Ultimately what they are talking about here would put more work on the heart, the energy source of blood flow.
What the formula or law regarding conversion of energy?
Then again I suppose if you cut off your arms and legs your heart can then take on more work without shorting your life ????
What ever happened to the wind generators? I heard that someone made a computer system with such a generator built in.
Just remember that a food calorie is actuall a kilocalorie. Assuming you made that mistake (maybe you didn't), that means you need 1/4000th of a gram of sugar. Excellent weight-loss program indeed! (OTOH, one could imagine a whole fleet of these in your system. It'd still have to be a pretty big fleet for it to matter too much.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
the additional energy taken from and stress placed on your heart only reduces your lifespan by an average 5 years!
My guess is that this energy is too small to put any additional stress on the heart.
Not if it's scaled up to any practical size - even to power very tiny stuff.
Pulling energy from the flow or the vibrations in it raises the backpressure. The pressure has to rise or the pressure in the veins downstream collapse in the lower-pressure part of the cycle, which causes all sorts of havoc, such as floating blood clots that produce strokes and heart attacks.
Pulling energy from the flexing of the vessels due to the pressure cycle resists the pressure cycle, much like "hardening of the arteries". Again either the amplitude of the cycle must increase - leading to both overpressure on the high side and a positive feedback crash of the system over time - or the vessels leading to or from the constriction suffer problems, leading to stuff like floating clots...
Best option would be to splice the genny in like it was additional tissue with a normal blood supply and a normal reaction to blood flow. But you'd still need to have the heart expand and do more work, which would still be likely to lead to shortened time before old-age style circulatory problems set in.
There are several other ways to pull power from the body that don't involve screwing around with the load on the heart. So this one seems to me to be a non-starter.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Surely this can be done from outside the body. A couple pods taped to the right places and wired to a charger of some sort should be adequate. I used to have issues with my bicycle computer (cyclometer) when I kept in in my pocket. Typically the material in the pocket isn't that thick and the contact points on the bottom of the unit would be close to my leg. Occasionally I'd pull it out and it'd be giving me erratic reading like I was going 70mph though I wasn't on my bike. Since then I no longer keep the cyclometer in my pocket so as not to skew my averages when I'm tracking my rides.
Sex tends to burn out the electronics.
Close enough. Give or take a few page numbers (which may be down to editions) and a typo in the quote of the final sentences.
Now there is a Blue Pill and a Red Pill.
Eclipse PDE and Me
This could kill the joke that features the punchline: "No Doc I don't want you to remove it, I just want you to change the batteries."
In the past, the idea of harvesting energy from living tissue has centered on chemical reactions - attempting to use the glucose in the bloodstream or what not. That's fine (so long as it can be done safely), because the systems that regulate glucose availability probably have the overhead capacity to spare (at least by comparison). But when you talk about tapping the bloodstream's KE, I start to get nervous, because then you're talking about the heart. That's where the energy you're tapping is going to come from. When your heart wears out, you're more or less done. I'm already doing enough bad things to my heart (vis diet and exercise) - I don't want to make it work any harder.
the matrix anybody? nano technology alwas disturbs me.
How do they intend to actually use the energy? I doubt a little machine floating around in your body a la "The Magic School Bus" would transfer anything out very easily.
(and, no, I didn't RTFA}
All my energy went into my new Gentoo install last night, I'm spent.
bloooooooooooooood....?
To bad this won't power heart implants or artificial hearts.
Just capture all the methane coming out of the exhaust pipe.
What?
I can't think of a better use for my excess calories. The fatter I am, the more personal devices I can power. If that's not enough, I can drink more beer. Isn't science wonderful
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I, for one, welcome our new nano robotian overlords.
Caller: My cell phone won't turn on!
Support: Can you check your heart and make sure it's beating?
The hope is to incorporate the new nanogenerator into biosensors, environmental monitoring devices and even personal electronics that will require no fuel source, internal or external.
Ehm.. There would be an external fuel source: the body.
You've read about it here first. With my copyright (refer to bottom of the page). Someday, you will all want an inductive girdle implanted around your waist paired with an inductive gadget belt where you can hang all your electronic doodads. They can stay charged all day long while you gab continuously or listen to music on your choclear implants, while chatting with your electroni molars. That mental picture I've just drawn? We will call it prior art, and now I'll just sit back and wait for the money.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Headline: "Nerds everywhere find fault with new body energy technology, discover fault is they're too fat for it to work"
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
At least in the scientific (i.e., non-food) sense, 1 gram of carbs contains 4 thousand calories. I've always heard that you need to burn 3500 kcal to lose 1 pound of fat. Since, 1 kg = 2.2 pounds, that would seem to work out to 7700 kcal. I like your number better, though. :D
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Especially, as the wiki page shows, since the food "C"alorie is also often just called a calorie. Anyways, my point was just that I wasn't sure whether he included the original factor of 1,000 in his calculations, as that can change things by 3 orders of magnitude (or 10 if you're in CS). :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Combined with a form of fusion, this will be all the power we'll ever need.
Hackaday's newest I-pod hacks:
DIY: USB adapter you can hook up to your spinal cord to charge up your I-pod!
What if my heart stops! No circulation and then no power for my bionic fingers to dial 911 on my wrist watch.
if this works perfectly, they will have created a way for machines to use humans as food.
sure, on a tiny scale, the tiny fractions of a watt seem insignificant - but the energy is not free, it slows your bloodstream a tiny amount.
when a nanoscale does it's typical ramping up to larger swarms to do a collective job, it can and will eventually add up.
just add self-replication and we have a potentially awesome sci-fi horror flick without the fi.
Nano generators in my blood? No thanks!
I don't need any little turbines further clogging up the works. My heart has enough work to do as it is. Burn off fat cells, now, and you're talking. Just as long as I can sit on my ass while it works. Exercise sucks.
I piss off bigots.
That article in the summary is misleading. The article at Georgia Tech is a lot better. I was thinking of a bunch of wires hanging in your aorta. But they talk about putting them in your shoes or muscles, which makes more sense. I have since changed my position on it entirely.
622677120
Trapping DoD funding
or are you Hypedot?
"eugh, heart attack!"
See, someone found a potential alternative use already! (haha, captcha="villains")
Try this.
That's right. Somebody thought of this before The Matrix was made. I would not be surprised at all if it was thought up several times over before Stephen King wrote a book related to this....
Now personally what I am waiting for is a blonde, blue eyed chick in a nano suit powered by this.
Until then, my brain will be in cryofreeze.
...towards equipping myself with a couple of alphaware cyberarms and a datajack.
Are people that desperate to have their smartphone on at all times that they need to harvest the energy their heart generates to power it? Maybe that's a little drastic, but they mentioned personal electronics. Do people really need to have their devices charged by blood flow? I understand pacemakers or things of that nature because they keep you alive. If it isn't necessary, why POWER it with YOUR HEART? The fact that people even thought that is a little appalling.
I think for many people, yes they are that desperate.
Imagine the idiot who wears his bluetooth cell-phone thingy in his EAR while in a movie theater or church. I bet he would be the first to step up for a blood-powered thingy. And he probably wouldn't mind if the whole cell phone could be implanted inside him, just as long as it contained enough ringtones.
What ever happened to the wind generators? I heard that someone made a computer system with such a generator built in.
Are you referring to devices that generate wind, or to devices that generate electricity using wind?
I'm equally puzzled... Did someone have a computer with enough wind INSIDE it to justify the generator? I hope their CPU is ruggedly attached, they may get tornadoes or the occasional hurricane inside...
Otherwise, I thought there was a highly scientific name for a "wind generator". I believe they are called "fans". And lucky me, my computer has one.
You may not need the system to be wired up in series... which could cause some problems if it fails or clogs. It would probably be best to replace sections of artery with an artificial tube, which has a specifically designed membrane wall allowing the glucose and whatever else you need to permeate through to the fuel cell/reactor side.
The dream of a "built in" personal computer connected directly to your brain is going to require such a power source...
Plus, imagine personal mobile computing then... forget USB charging, plug your Ipod into your spleen!
I'm gonna pass on this one. TYVM. I've seen too many batteries overloaded for comfort.
Just to clear confusion, 1 microAmp (uA) = 0.000001A. i.e. millionths. Same thing follows for other units.
0.000000001 = nano-. (billionths)
If you really can't remember.
---k--
</stupid>