KneeBrace
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Taking walks with this leg brace can power an artificial heart
Someday, folks with artificial hearts might have to take long, daily walks to stay alive -- not because exercise is good for their health, but because those walks literally power their synthetic organ. A team of students from Rice University called "Farmers" are developing a device that can generate energy and feed it back into the body to be used by an artificial heart. Their creation? A modified medical leg brace with a motor attached right on the joint, so it can produce energy every time the user bends his knee. An earlier prototype for the same project -- it's a multi-year endeavor, and the current model is the brainchild of the third batch of students -- could also generate power by walking. However, that wasn't a brace, but a shoe with a pedal attached to the sole.
Electricity-generating knee brace fails the American Dream
Some researchers at the University of Michigan are clearly misdirected in their goals to harvest energy from a knee brace. The device generates electricity in a method similar to regenerative breaking in a hybrid car, so the attempt is to harvest wasted kinetic energy in your knee from when your leg hits the ground and at other points in your stride. Hopes are to reclaim this energy for use to power gadgetry on your person, or perhaps a prosthetic limb, and the researchers claim it only takes an extra watt of metabolic power for each watt of electricity generated -- compared to 6.4 watts of metabolic for a hand-crank, for instance -- but we'd say that's still one watt too many: if we were meant to use our own calories to power devices, why did God make batteries and solar panels?
