M2E’s Motion-Powered Gadget Charger

M2E Power, a startup building technology that can harness everyday motion to power gadgets, is currently developing an external charger for powering cell phones and mobile devices that could be available as early as 2009.

M2E Power’s director of business development, Regan Rowe, tells us that the company is aiming to have the charger provide an hour of talk time for some six hours of normal movement (about two days). Rowe says that since the average for most cell-phone users is about 30 minutes of talk time a day, the motion-powered charger “could take lots of folks off the grid.”

The company is based in Boise, Idaho, and has licensed technology from Idaho National Lab to create a microgenerator and a battery storage system that can capture energy from the daily motions of the human body. It works according to the principles of Faraday’s law of induction, which states that moving a conductor through a magnetic field will induce a current in that conductor proportional to the speed of movement. M2E has managed to tweak the output of the Faraday setup to generate a lot more power than previous kinetic energy systems — an increase of between 300 percent and 700 percent vs. what’s currently available, according to the company.

That would be cool if this technology was integrated into a cell phone case so that your daily movements would keep your phone fully charged. Also, imagine being on a call, running low on battery power you then being able to just shake the phone until you get enough power to continue. This would be even cooler if they could build this technology directly into the phone itself.

via Earth2Tech