Human motion energy harvesting using a piezoelectric MFC patch

The improvements in efficiency of electronic components and miniaturization is quickly pushing wearable devices. Kinetic human energy harvesting is a way to power these components reducing the need of batteries replacement since walking or running is how humans already expend much of their daily energy. This work explores the case of kinetic energy from bending of a piezoelectric patch. For assessing the quality of the system, a testing setup has been designed and controlled by means of knee joint recordings obtained from a large motion dataset. The promising result of the chosen patch is an output power of 2.6μW associated to a run activity.