Batteries are turning out to be one of the less-tractable problems for wearable tech, but the research company that invented the MP3 format is working on technology might help gear power itself.
Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is heading a consortium that’s building a flexible wearable energy harvester called MATFLEXEND. The idea is that as the harvester flexes, its capacitance changes, generating (presumably small but non-trivial) amounts of electricity, which can be stored in a flexible Li-Ion battery and used.
There are research and production partners across Europe. The project kicked off in October, and is slated to run to September 2016.