human powered electrical devices

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I think the point is made quite forcibly by all the expert posters here- you cant power electrical devices with the ELECTRICITY generated by the human body.

But your notion does raise an interesting second question.

What if you could hook up electrical generators to the human body that worked off of the non-electrical metabolic energy of the human body?

What if you could recharge all of your -calculators, cell phones, Ipods, by plugging them into these generators which would be inturn plugged into your body?

If you could do that- skinny people might have to eat a little more. But fat folks might loose wieght. People with a propesisty for obesity would gain self esteem because their talent for generating fat- would be translated into a talent for powering portable appliances.

what happens when you plug to many devices into yourself? Will people walk around in emaciated but well charged devices on them?

Wouldn't fat people have a major advantage over skinny people in terms of how many devices they can power? I can easily imagine people selling their bodies to power devices for other people.

What I think would be interesting is if you could fashion thermovoltaic cells into a cloth, and turn it into clothes (something similar to thermal underwear and whatnot). It wouldn't be able to produce large quantities of electricity, but it might be enough to perpetually power your cell phone.

I've heard of shoes that use kinetic energy to power things, but I don't think the human body generates enough energy to power much of anything...

Here's an interesting article on the subject that's been on CNN.com today:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/22/nano ... index.html

Depending how fit you are, you can run a generator with an exercise bike and make
100 watts easy for quite a while or 500 watts which will feel like a very steep hill.

You can watch TV and run a computer on that generator until you get tired.
A small TV and a laptop all day I suppose.

They used to make flashlights with no batteries but a trigger squeeze handle
that ratcheted a generator to light up the bulb. Now they have ones that you
shake for a while to charge the battery and then let some LEDs shine for a little while,
and also wind-up generator flashlights and wind-up radios for 3rd world countries
that can't afford batteries (and sold elsewhere as "emergency radios").

It is probably possible to make a human powered flashlight with two different metals
(copper and zinc-galvanize, held in wet hands)
and a circuit which is now called a Joule Thief, which is cheap and easy to make with
radio shack stuff, and is basically a flashlight that runs on a dead battery from other
flashlights for about a week using a simple homemade transformer to amplify the
last remaining fractions of a volt enough to power a super bright LED.
If not, a lemon will power that. But don't use the lemon, nor be a human flashlight
for much longer than experimental purpose or you may get heavy metal poisoning
since hands are slightly acid and electricity comes from chemical reactions in
batteries because chemistry IS an electronic phenomenon.

The most practical use for human powered electronic devices would be for artificial internal organs. At the moment, with artificial hearts, the means of powering them is quite crude - often a person has to have wires sticking out of their chest, which makes their hold on life tenuous at best. Little better is the use of batteries, which require pretty major surgery every time they're about to go flat. So it would be a huge breakthrough if they were able to invent a fuel cell which is able to extract oxygen and glucose from the blood and use it to generate electricity, as artificial organs would be able to be powered by the same source that organic organs are powered by.