Harvesting The Energy In Human Motion

From MIT's Technology Review comes this article with an idea straight from the Matrix movies. At some point in the not too distant future, almost everything will have an embedded computer and getting all these devices to talk to each other will allow us to do things from track individual pieces of mail to knowing when we're running low on milk.

How to power all this new tech? Batteries are expensive and impractical. Maria Gorlatova and pals at Columbia University in New York who have measured the inertial energy available from the activity of 40 individuals over periods up to 9 days have come up with an answer: human motion.

The article discusses the methods and the amount of energy available from this method and they are not inconsiderable. And here are some of the results of their findings.

             Periodic motion is energy rich. So writing with a pencil generates
             more power (10-15 microwatts) than the acceleration associated
             with a 3-hour flight flight including take off, landing and turbulence,
             which never generated more than 5 microwatts.

             Walking generates the same amount of power as indoor lighting
             (about 150 microwatts). Running generates around 800 microwatts.

             Purposeful shaking generates up to 3,500 microwatts, 30 times
             more than walking.

Now they just have to figure how to collect this wasted energy, instead of just measuring it.