You know that feeling that you have “a radio in your head” and some song gets stuck there and you can’t stop hearing it? New research on “no battery” electrical devices at Duke University might someday mean that you really would have a radio in your head.
This article caught my eye in yesterday’s New York Times . Matt Reynolds, an electrical engineering professor at Duke, is working on “self-powered” devices that use the radio waves all around us in the atmosphere to power electrical devices. He has founded a company whose first product is a “beeper” built into a hard hat that can warn the wearer when he is too close to a piece of dangerous construction equipment. The amazing thing about this beeper is it needs no external power source (no battery) because it is powered by radio waves.
Equipment on the job site transmits its location and when a wearer of the beeper-equipped hard hat gets too close, a warning buzzer lets him know to watch out. Since the radio waves that provide power for the device are around all the time and free to anything that can utilize them, this device has perpetual power-no battery change required-ever!
Radio waves are all around us in the atmosphere, produced by radio and tv towers, cell phone transmissions, Wi-Fi transmitters and lots of other sources. Professor Reyonolds research and development allows harvesting of the the power from random waves without impacting those transmitted for a specific use.
Major companies like Intel have expressed an interest in this research and exploitation of “random” waves has already proved that they can power some calculators and clocks, replacing a AAA battery.
Someday, your inability to “get that song out of your head” may be complicated by the fact that a radio wave powered device could actually be implanted in your head.
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