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MIT Wristband Is a Personal Climatizer
rcastro0 writes "What looks like a CPU's heat sink worn around the wrist apparently may be able to make you feel cool even while it is hot — or warm while it is cold. As Wired reports, this termoelectric device explores human physiology and how we perceive temperature to fool our body and make us comfortable. The device is called Wristify, and Mashable has a video."
Same thermoelectric bracelet as two weeks ago.
I did this at college with a peltier cooler, a backpack full of batteries, and a GPU water-cooling kit :\ It ain't rocket science, and Atlanta heat is a powerful motivator.
man someone should give that girl in the video a bracelet.
she sure looks hot.
DARPA was working on something similar to this. It was a special glove that actively drew blood to the surface of the skin on your hand and cooled it:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html
Looks like someone managed to commercialize it: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/cgi-bin/gforum.cgi?post=4495810
Anyway, your hands and toes are already your body's natural radiators, since they have a relatively high surface-area to volume ratio. Your body can already regulate its temperature naturally by pumping more blood into the capillaries near the surface of the skin when it needs to cool off more. As it mentions in the Wired article, simply applying a cold heat sink won't really work, since your body tends to draw blood circulation away from contact with cold surfaces, so you'd also need the pump or something to force the blood circulation back towards the heat sink.
When I do martial arts, I find I get the best cooling by simply swinging my hands back and forth. That gives me forced convection through my fingers, combined with enhanced evaporative cooling of my sweaty palms, while the extra centripetal acceleration draws blood out closer to my fingertips.
There's another similar body hack for those of us with trouble regulating your temperature while sleeping and tend to overheat and start sweating under your blankets: simply sleep with your hands and/or feet sticking out from under the blanket. This will let your body better regulate its core temperature using its natural mechanisms of pumping more blood closer to the skin for more cooling, or drawing blood away from the skin to retain heat and maintain proper core temperature. Hey, it's this "one simple weird trick" for better sleep, on the internet... who would have thunk it?
The Hittites developed a somewhat different technology for personal climactic control known as the "sweater" c. 1700 BCE. It was independently invented by the Mayans; however, neither civilization apparently prepared source code for distribution under terms that today's FSF would find acceptable.
And this summary explores human tolerance for dupes of stories that have already been posted.
Whatever could go wrong with that?
Yes. I was thinking the same thing.
Kinda reminds me of drinking brandy to feel warmer.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh, but this is in a whole new league of foolingishness beyond sipping brandy... AND it's being done in the name of boosting corporate profits and not improving the human condition.
I realize that the Slashdot "editors" stopped doing any real editing years ago, but how did this story get all the way to the front page without anybody noticing that "thermoelectric" was misspelled?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The trick to using alcohol to feel warmer is that you should only do it when you are back out of the cold or in some cases soon will be.
It can be a fine method to stave off frostbite when you are quite certain you will be in the warm soon. It can also be useful if you are quite certain your exposure will be brief.
The classic drinking out in the snow is very definitely a bad idea.
In the case of this device, it isn't meant to make a 120 degree hike in the desert feel like a spring day, it's to make a 78 degree home feel like it's 72.
was useless. Way to take a couple minutes to tell me almost nothing more then you did in the title!
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
MIT Wristband Is a Personal Climaxer and hoped for something completely different.
A techno vampire grammar nazi... that's some scary shit.
Agriculture helps to get food. So we should promote this technology very effectively....................
So it's really a device for pampered pussies who can't just suck it up and ignore the heat like normal people do?
PS I have no fucking idea what those numbers mean. Here in the civilized world we've stopped using the Reaumur scale or whatever centuries ago.
In the last few years there have been a few wristbands designed by "NASA" and other places, and it is a very recurring theme for finding suckers. From the copper wristband in the 90s, that had tremendous health effects due to the metal blah blah, to the power silicon wristband which keeps your chakras happy, and which the idea is patented blah blah, the idea has been usually to sell a very cheap production item at luxury prices. The fact also this was presented in a MIT competition isn't the same as being developed by MIT, btw.
...just like samzenpus
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/17/1654211/a-thermoelectric-bracelet-to-maintain-a-comfortable-body-temperature
electronic crap that only works for one semester
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
If so, then I'm NOT interested in this.
the same sort of device, but the feeling is more of dread and a widening of the primary exit orifice - all thanks to Progressivism
And this would be such a great thing for my level of comfort, I'd love to try it.
There's only one thing, I'd have to be sure it isn't fooling (or not too much) the body's thermo-regulation system. I'd hate to die of heat stroke because my brain thought my core temperature was 98.6F when actually it was 106F.
Anyway perhaps this is actually (very efficiently!) lowering or raising the core body temperature. I understand that someone discovered that the past (current?) method of cooling off NFL football players, dunking their heads in ice cold water, was counterproductive. It causes the capillaries in the face/head to constrict REDUCING heat transfer when you want to increase it. Thus someone came up with a box that applied a partial vacuum to the hands which (combined with some cold water) efficiently reduced their temperature. Hopefully this device works using this principle (and perhaps the DARPA gloves do the same).
Anyone know if this is a perceived or actual control of body temperature?
So you have no idea if I described a warm day or the fires of hell but take it upon yourself to question anyone who doesn't just suck it up? Why don't you just go back to piously flagellating yourself and let the grown-ups talk?
Whoever actually wears that in public gets a geek license for life.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
beyond sipping brandy... AND it's being done in the name of boosting corporate profits
So you make your own brandy and don't buy it from a corporation?
PS I have no fucking idea what those numbers mean. Here in the civilized world we've stopped using the Reaumur scale or whatever centuries ago.
Ah, so you are too dumb to even look it up. I'm surprised you managed to find the "post" button and type in a captcha.
Learn to love Alaska
Whatever could go wrong with that?
I wondered about that. Is your level of thermal comfort directly related to the difference between your body temp and your desired body temp. If you are sweating to keep cool and feeling hot and yuck, will making you feel nice by cooling your wrist turn down/off your sweating, resulting in dangerous overheating, or will it just make you feel better but keep the sweat pouring out? I'm sure TFA has the details but I didn't read it when it originally appeared on slashdot so i'm sure not reading the dupe.
Kinda reminds me of drinking brandy to feel warmer.
Or maybe it's like eating spicy food to keep cooler?
MIT Solves Global Climate Change on an Individual Level
Silence is a state of mime.
Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to put on a sweater or turn on a fan??? Geez....
These guys covered all their bases. Note the appropriately chubby and pasty white hand model chosen for the Wristify picture. It's like I'm actually looking at the underbelly of some poor, dead bloated fish.... One with a heat sync strapped around its neck and ...ummmm, covered in pubic hair.
Who knows? On one hand, one immediately thinks about all those people who are close to dying in the heat without knowing about it, because they've reached the stage when they no longer feel hot. Yet then again, if this is more like the heat regulation that dogs do with their tongues, it's not such a bad thing. I'm certain that at least the EU will make sure that thing doesn't accidentally kill people if it were to be launched on our markets.
Except in extreme circumstances (similar to senior citizens dying because they used a fan in a overly hot room) not much. Your thermal regulation is based mainly on blood temperature measured by the hypothalamus. This is no different than wearing flip-flops instead of boot on a warm day.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
A Peltier element with a timer.
Woooooooo.
-_-
Tut, tut. Some of us do. You can't find chokecherry, elderberry or persimmon (tastes like champagne) for purchase, you have to make it. And it's very simple to do.
Doing this in a hat to cool your head would be more effective i would think. And wouldn't look so damned stupid either.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
on demand????
My wife has spina bifida -- as one of the effects, she doesn't sweat. At all.
This has the effect that when living somewhere where outside temperatures go above mid-90s, she's under doctor's orders to never be away from air conditioning, ever.
A personal, portable climate control device would be great... if it were more than just illusion. I imagine something peltier-effect based with a backpack -- perhaps with the actual heat-transfer region on the other side of a heat pipe, and thus able to be located under clothing. Sure, they're energy-inefficient, so even a Li-Co battery of reasonable weight wouldn't last that long, but being able to be outside for 30 minutes instead of 2 without getting heat stroke would be a big improvement.
Not that the tech will be personally relevant for long -- we're moving to Chicago in the spring.
The CoolWare Personal Cooling System 3.0
Life is not for the lazy.
This is old technology gussied up.
My grandfather taught me the simple trick nearly half a century ago of when you want to cool down to dunk your hands or feet in a bucket of water. To warm up, use hot water. This is merely a portable powered high tech version of this simple technology that has been around for a long time (thousands of years). Nothing new.
I always wondered about the characters in wheel of time. in the books, it describes the technique as a trick, rather than magic use, to ignore the heat and not sweat.. In that case, i thought, all the aes sedai, would drop over from heat stroke.
If this tech is simply tricking your body into thinking you are cooler than you are, isn't that actually risking heat stroke?
Why is it such a shock that people in Brazil, a locale with a year-round tropical climate (as far as I know, anyway), use less air conditioning than people in the US, the majority of which swing between very cold to relatively quite hot. You'd find the same difference between say... Arizona and South Dakota.
How about instead of inventing devices to solve imaginary problems, we invent people that stop using statistics as though they are useful numbers?
I definitely wouldn't use it for long periods, but fooling your body's perception heat could have interesting uses. I'd love to see this stuff hooked up to a TV or a computer to give appropriate temperature stimuli during a movie or a game. It would be like smellovision, just actually working.
That might be a more legitimate use for this than how it's being marketed now.
I have the same thermocouples that they are using and those things are ferociously inefficient. So the question is how effective is the cooling effect as compared to the huge amount of heat that would pour off the other side of the thing? I am not saying that it doesn't work but their device does have the necessary heat sink which also might be a wee bit problematic in that it will be both warm and cumbersome.