There's a company in Busan, South Korea, called Jenax; its main business seems to be stainless steel thread used to make firefighters' turn-out gear. At a wearables conference in Japan last week, Jenax showed what media reports say is a foldable Li-Ion battery that can bend 1 million times in its lifecycle. Not all the details as they are being reported add up. Some reports … [Read more...]
A Flexible Battery, But You Can’t Buy It
We've written about curved batteries, which are pretty cool. But Samsung is now showing flexible batteries, which not only bend, but can be bent repeatedly. The claim is that you can bend it around a cup and it will work just fine. The implications for wearables should be clear: batteries that can conform to whatever shape they need to, and that can flex along with your body … [Read more...]
Fraunhofer Explores Self-Powering Flexible Wearables
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 … [Read more...]
Xerox Flexibles and Microduinos
It's intuitively obvious that wearables will require flexible circuits; The human body, after all, moves and consists of curves; boxes are not fashionable. Xerox is positioning itself as an expert in all things printing, and has gotten itself interested in the printing of electronic circuitry on flexible substrate. Another strategy might be to make the rigid circuitry very … [Read more...]
Battery Tech: FLCB
We may be late on this, but we're hearing about a new flexible battery technology -- Lithium-Ceramic -- from a Taiwanese company ProLogium (be warned that the page likes to pop up lots of dialogs welcoming you). The batteries, called FLCB, are flexible and can apparently be made credit-card thin, as this video illustrates: ProLogium also has posted a video showing how … [Read more...]