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Soon heat from your body may be used to power up a mobile phone! Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany have developed new circuits that could harness electricity from body heat that would otherwise be dissipated into thin air.

Scientists hope that this advancement could lead to battery-less mobile phones as well as medical monitors that draw energy from their users. This could prove to be very eco-friendly.

According to Peter Spies, electrical engineer and group manager at the Institute, “the idea behind it is that you can replace the batteries or at least you can enlarge the operation times of batteries.”

In fact, Spies together with his team improvised on semiconductors called thermoelectric generators. Such generators are able to produce electrical energy in eth face of temperature differences.

After many studies conducted using the thermoelectric generators, the researchers have concluded that a difference of quite a lot of degrees is needed to generate power. But, there is hardly any difference between the temperatures of the body and its environment.

Spies and his team incorporated a component into the charge pump circuit in order to illuminate the difference. As of now, this circuit is able to store incoming millivolts until they reach 1.8 volts.

At this very threshold, an internal transistor turns on and begins to provide higher voltage to the component that can easily transfer the electricity to a device.

According to Matthias Ueltzen, an application engineer at Freiburg, “Only a very small part of the thermal heat flow can be converted into electrical power, and for that reason the technology may only work for applications that don’t require a lot of energy.”

If these researchers are able to successfully convert body heat into energy to power up devices, it would be good for the environment as batteries will not be required and of course less power would be consumed worldwide.