German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM and the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM, plus a team of research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen have developed a way of harnessing natural body heat to generate electricity.

“We combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts. This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat alone.”

It all is based on a thermoelectric generator (TEG) which extracts electrical energy from hot and cold temperatire differentials. Future improvements will allow a temperature difference of only 0.5 degrees to generate electricity.