New Fabrics Harvest Motion to Power Wearables

StretchSense is developing elastic fabrics that harvest energy through human motion.

New Zealand based StretchSense has already made a splash on the wearable market with their stretchable capacitive sensors. Now the company is taking another big step in making these wearable sensors self powered through motion.

The StretchSense electric fabrics will be able to harvest energy from the motion of the wearer. Ben O’Brien, CEO of StretchSense said in an interview with Wearable Technologies: “The future is self-powered and at the conference we will present our vision for smart discreet sensors that you can simply wear and forget.”

Powering wearable devices is a huge problem. Just look at the Apple Watch and its daily charging requirement. “Wear and forget” is the holy grail of wearables. Harvesting motion seems to be method with high potential. We also covered recently ways to harvest energy from stray radio frequencies emanated by Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

New Zealand based StretchSense will show their self-powered wearable sensors at the Wearable Technologies conference in San Francisco next month. The conference details can be found here.

Below is a video where the StretchSense team shows off their current wearable motion sensors.