This Bodysuit Turns People Into Batteries

In an obscure film from 1999 called The Matrix, mean robots turn human people into batteries to power their evil robot shenanigans—at least I think that’s what happens, I haven’t seen the movie since Bush was in office. That movie was sci-fi, but the human battery idea doesn’t seem that farfetched, right? The laws of thermodynamics are undeniable and we consume energy, so that energy must go somewhere. It goes to movement, brain thinking, and a whole lot of waste heat. Nick Zetta of the Basically Homeless YouTube channel decided to harness that waste heat to make the human battery concept a reality.

The idea here was to capture the waste heat from a human body and turn that into electricity useful for doing work. In an industrial setting, you might turn heat into electricity by boiling water and using the steam to spin a turbine. But that isn’t practical in this situation for a variety of reasons, including the delicate nature of the human body and its inability to withstand boiling water. Luckily, there is an alternative that works at more moderate temperatures: thermoelectric power generation.

A thermoelectric generator is device that uses a temperature differential to force electron flow. That means that when one side is hotter than the other side, it makes electricity. Zetta’s idea was to cover a bodysuit in thermoelectric generators and work up a good sweat while standing outside in the cold. The temperature differential between his overheated body and the cold air would, ideally, be enough to generate power sufficient to charge a smartphone.

To that end, Zetta implemented several strategies to get his skin temperature as high as possible, including exercising, drinking alcohol, and using capsaicin (both ingested and topical). Sadly, despite all of those efforts, he just wasn’t producing enough power to do anything notable.

But Zetta did notice something: the generators produced decent power at first, but then the output would quickly drop. That happens as the temperature differential gets closer to equalizing. So, Zetta came up with a plan to prevent that from happening. By only applying his body heat to the thermoelectric generators in short “pulses,” he could keep the output at either a relatively high level or nothing.

That proved to be enough to move a small, lightweight robot across a table. I can’t emphasize enough how little power that took, but it wasn’t nothing and so this makes Zetta a kind of predecessor to Agent Smith.