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Smartwatches
TechScience & Research

Smartwatches powered by wearers: CUHK researchers aim to harvest energy from human movements

  • CUHK researchers create compact generator small enough to be embedded in smartwatches, which can harvest energy from movement
  • Users can power their own devices just by moving around, eliminating the need to ever remove smartwatches to charge them

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CUHK researchers aim to harvest the energy created by human motion to power smartwatches and wristbands. Photo: Handout
Tracy Qu

In a laboratory in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), researchers study a swinging metal pole designed to mimic the movement of human arms.

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Using a highly compact generator containing fewer than 10 components – including a motion capture unit and power generation unit – the researchers aim to harvest the energy created by human motion to power smartwatches and wristbands.

This research, documented in academic journals including Applied Energy and IEEE Internet of Things Journal earlier this year, comes amid a boom in the popularity of wearable technologies. Wearable shipments jumped nearly 90 per cent year-on-year in 2019, according to market research firm IDC. The global smartwatch market was worth US$20.64 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $96.31 billion by 2027, according to another report by research firm Allied Market Research. 
Smartwatches from the Apple Watch to Fitbit have become an especially common accessory among health enthusiasts in recent years. By tracking metrics including the quality of your sleep, your heart rate and even your blood oxygen levels, these gadgets can help you piece together an image of your overall health and make improvements to it.

There is one problem – due to limited battery life, this image will always have gaps representing the stretches of time when you are charging your device.

“Some data such as heart rate tracking should be 24-hours non-stop, but when you charge the smartwatch, you need to take it off,” said CUHK researcher Cai Mingjing. “[My smartwatch] needs to be charged once a week, which means a gap of several hours,” the 30-year-old PhD holder said.

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