The first watch to make use of the body's natural heat to uphold battery charge in wearables is now even being crowdfunded on Indiegogo. Who else but researchers from Texas A&M University (a hot place) came up with the solution.

In today's wearables battery life is a bottleneck, as increasing amounts of technology gets packed into lightweight designs comfortable enough for everyday wear. That’s why Texas A&M professor Choongho Yu and his PhD student, Suk Lae Kim, designed a thermally-chargeable solid-state supercapacitor.

Despite having no apparent links with the researchers, a smartwatch which uses the same thermoelectric concept has arrived on Indiegogo seeking crowdfunding. The MATRIX PowerWatch claims to be the world’s first smartwatch that you never have to charge.

Thermoelectric technology converting heat to electric power is based on the Seebeck effect discovered in 1821. In the absence of an applied voltage gradient, an electric current can still be generated if there is a temperature gradient. A thermoelectric material must have a low thermal conductivity and high electrical conductivity to function efficiently.

PowerWatch runs off your body heat and when you take it off, your data is stored in memory and it goes to sleep. When you put it back on, the watch resumes where you left it. It's got a power meter that tells you how much electricity your body heat is producing. 

The standard Indiegogo pricing is $139, the crowdfunding page is here. On January 14, 2017 the product  was 937% funded.
 
Image credit: iStockPhoto/knape