This New Battery Tech Could Utilize Body Heat to Power an Apple Watch

Are you one of those people who run a little hot? Thanks to new battery technology that turns body heat into usable energy, you may have the luxury of always having a full charge on your device.

Researchers at the University of Colorado recently developed this new battery technology using a material called polyamine.

Polyamine is flexible and stretchable, allowing it to bend around your wrist or another part of the body.

Polyamine is also self-healing allowing it to repair itself after it has been cut. The team slices the material with a razor blade to demonstrate below how it can reform itself without outside assistance. It also can be pieced together like Lego bricks allowing them to create complicated chargers.

The polyamine is impressive by itself, but the researchers went a step further. The team embedded the polyamine with thermoelectric generators that capture body heat. These generators then turn that heat into energy that can charge a connected device.

In an article published in Science Advances, the team demonstrates the technology by creating a wearable device that looks like a ring.

The technology is still in the early stages producing only one volt of energy for every square centimeter of skin.

With a large enough strip of polyamine, a person could power a watch or fitness tracker. They hope to improve the technology to the point where it could power a device directly without relying on a battery. This configuration would allow a device to charge endlessly and never run out of power.