R&D Roundup: Sweat power, Earth imaging, testing ‘ghostdrivers’

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances, along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups.

This week: one step closer to self-powered on-skin electronics; people dressed as car seats; how to make a search engine for 3D data; and a trio of Earth imaging projects that take on three different types of disasters.

Sweat as biofuel

Monitoring vital signs is a crucial part of healthcare and is a big business across fitness, remote medicine and other industries. Unfortunately, powering devices that are low-profile and last a long time requires a bulky battery or frequent charging is a fundamental challenge. Wearables powered by body movement or other bio-derived sources are an area of much research, and this sweat-powered wireless patch is a major advance.

A figure from the paper showing the device and interactions happening inside it.

The device, described in Science Robotics, uses perspiration as both fuel and sampling material; sweat contains chemical signals that can indicate stress, medication uptake, and so on, as well as lactic acid, which can be used in power-generating reactions.

The patch performs this work on a flexible substrate and uses the generated power to transmit its data wirelessly. It’s reliable enough that it was used to control a prosthesis, albeit in limited fashion. The market for devices like this will be enormous and this platform demonstrates a new and interesting direction for researchers to take.