Parasitic Power Harvesting in Shoes

system to date has served all of the needs of wearable computing--light weight, minimum effort, high power generation, convenient power delivery, and good power regulation. We believe that our approach has the potential to solve these problems for a class of wearable devices by placing both the generator and powered electronics in a location where considerable energy is easily available, namely the shoe. As the power requirements for microelectronics continue decreasing, environmental energy sources can begin to replace batteries in certain wearable subsystems. In this spirit, this paper examines three different devices that can be built into a shoe, (where excess energy is readily harvested) and used for generating electrical power "parasitically"while walking. Two of these are piezoelectric in nature: a unimorph strip made from piezoceramic composite material and a stave made from a multilayer laminate of PVDF foil. The third is a shoe-mounted rotary magnetic generator. Tes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ISWC
• Authors: John Kymissis, Clyde Kendall, Joseph A. Paradiso, Neil Gershenfeld
• Keywords: Certain Wearable Subsystems, Convenient Power Delivery, Human Computer Interaction, ISWC 1998, Wearable