This Gadget Charges Your Devices Using Your Knee Motions

Pumping Up

This new knee brace is lightweight and is able to extract energy from the gait of a person to charge up medical devices, even a mobile phone or wearables.

According to the Applied Physics Letters journal published on Tue, this device weighs 317.5 grams. As reported, the knee brace does not make it become noticeably more difficult for wearers to straighten or bend their knees, which means the device is able to assist people in capitalizing as much as possible on their motions while eliminating the demand on charging consumer electrical devices.

On the go

This knee brace was developed by scientists from the University of Hong Kong in China. It includes a slider-crank mechanism converting the knee’s rotary motion into linear motion. The mentioned mechanism has a rod that moves in and out of a “slider” which is attached to a band on the wearer's calf. Both the rod and the slider can pivot, which changes their angles in accordance with the bands. As a result, when the wearer walks, their knee motions make the rod move straight in and out of the slider.

As reported in New Atlas, they believe that this gadget is able to continuously charge medical devices of people or to ensure that the power of hikers’ devices is not used up when they are getting stuck very far from a power outlet. Besides, according to Applied Physics Letters journal, the project expects to be applied to people like mountaineers who need to continuously charge up electronic devices while they are trekking through rural areas.

At the moment, this project is still under the phase for proof of concept; therefore, there is no information about the time a commercial version may show up in the markets or its price. However, according to reports of New Atlas, there is a similar device which was developed 7 years ago and its price was expected to be about Rs 1,131.