Heating the Way to Health: Powering Wearable Health Gadgets with Body Heat for Continuous Operation

Wearable electronics play an important role these days in providing healthcare. Despite such remarkable progress in wearable technology, however, a pesky problem lingers on—all electronic devices need to be powered through batteries, which themselves need to be recharged and replaced from time to time, causing unwanted disruption in health monitoring. Professor Woochul Kim (Mechanical Engineering), along with researchers from Yonsei University and Texas A&M University, adopted an innovative approach that synergistically integrated a wearable TEG (WTEG) with a lithium-sulphur (Li-S) battery to obtain a power source that delivered power sustainably and continuously. Their findings were published in a recent study in Nano Energy.