Clever German engineers (that’s not the first time those words have been used) have developed small shoe-size gadgets that can literally turn your pavement pounding into raw power.
This is better news for the heel strikers than it is for the forefooters though. The tech – consisting of a shock harvester that generates power from the impact of your foot striking the ground and a swing harvester that converts energy while your feet are in the air – has been built to sit in the heel of the shoe.
Even heel strikers can forget charging their smartphones while they run though, the power output isn’t big enough for that but what it can do is provide enough juice for smaller wearable sensors and could open up the way for a range of other tracking innovation.
If you’re interested in how it works, I’ll leave the BBC to explain the science bit. Something about coils and magnetic fields. I’ll be over here trying to calculate how much power I’d have generated in 2014.
(Via: BBC Science)
