Development of Rotational Electret Energy Harvester for Capturing Power from Human Walking

In this paper, we present a wrist-worn rotational electret energy harvester for wearable devices to capture energy from human walking. Based on power generation analysis with the arm swing model, an improved rotational electret energy harvester prototype with the natural frequency of around 1 Hz is developed. The output power of prototype was characterized with a 6-axis multi-link robot by mimicking arm swing motion. It is found that 6 times higher output power than a previous prototype has been obtained even at slow walking speeds.