A backpack that reduces the forces on your body when carrying heavy loads could help prevent injury, allow soldiers to carry more equipment and even speed up the response time of emergency services, its designer claims.
When people walk, they tend to raise and lower their bodies by between 5 centimetres and 7 cm with each step. If they are carrying a backpack, the extra load must also be raised by the same amount and this puts extra strain on the body.
Now Larry Rome, a muscle physiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, has worked out a way to reduce these forces by fundamentally changing the design of the backpack.
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A backpack that generates electricity as its wearer strolls along has been developed by experts in human locomotion in the US.
By harnessing the loping up-and-down motion of our hips as we walk, the backpack’s freely-moving load bounces up and down, generating up to 7 watts. That is more than enough to power cellphones with power-draining functions like colour widescreens or Wi-Fi and GPS connections.
The developers hope their suspended-load backpack will be a particular boon for troops, field scientists, explorers and disaster relief workers in remote locations.
The generator has been developed by Larry Rome and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, US, with funding from the US Office of Naval Research. Their aim was to relieve soldiers already carrying 36-kilogram backpacks of the need to carry many spare batteries to power their GPS, communications and night-vision devices.
“The extra weight [of the batteries] compromises the amount of food, medicine and armament they can carry,” Rome explains.
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