Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
Um, that links right back here, and now I'm caught in an infinite loop until a family member comes along and breaks me. Thanks.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Correct link
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.
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.
electronic crap that only works for one semester
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
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?
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.
No, this one is a termoelectric bracelet. It's different.