15-year-old Angelo Casimiro has designed “Electricity Generating Footwear” – shoes that can charge your devices just from walking energy.
When I was 15, I was playing Mario Kart 64 and watching Dragonball Z. Angelo Casimiro, of the Philipines, was designing a pair of shoes that can harness the power of your footsteps to charge an electrical device. Casimiro unveiled his invention, the “Electricity Generating Footwear”, at the Google Science Fair this year – an event where Google challenges young inventors to come up with fresh new ideas for the future. Casimiro says he got the idea from realizing how many people are walking or running on a daily basis, and that there is a potential untapped source of energy literally right under our feet.
Essentially, his invention works by using the force of a person’s footsteps to create energy that is sent to a battery equipped with a USB outlet that can then charge other small electronic devices. While he does admit that it would take around eight hours of jogging to generate only about a quarter of the amount of energy needed to fully charge an iPhone 5, the device could be used for small, low powered devices such as flashlights.
In third-world and developing countries such as Casimiro’s home of the Philipines, where many people live in poverty with no proper electrical grids, a light source can be a very precious thing.
Casimiro estimates that the average person takes around 7,000 steps a day – which is more than enough to keep a flashlight, or even a portable radio charged.
He is getting a whole lot of support for his project from online communities, and he hopes to become an engineer in the future.
Source: Gizmodo Japan (Japanese) via Rocket News 24
