Is This the End of HVAC as We Know It?

We may have grabbed your attention with our headline, but we’re not really serious; HVAC is not going away anytime soon.

But there’s an interesting technology coming out of MIT – it’s probably a bit far off but it could augment your HVAC system.

A team of four engineering students at MIT have developed a bracelet that helps wearers control body temperature while helping buildings conserve energy.

With their invention, the MIT students even won the school’s seventh-annual MADMEC competition, sponsored by MIT’s Materials Science and Engineering program. The students netted a $10,000 prize that will help them continue developing the bracelet’s technology.

Sam Shames, one of the MIT students who helped invent the technology, told Wired that the team was inspired to solve an everyday problem: keeping everyone in a room comfortable when everyone has a difference temperature preference.

Shames says he runs hot, but his mom runs cold. He thought there must be a way two people can coexist peacefully.

The students hope their technology can increase personal comfort while cutting down the amount of energy needed to heat and cool entire buildings. “Why heat or cool a building when you could heat or cool a person?” Shames asks.

The students’ technology, named Wristify, is a wearable device that uses the Peltier effect to reduce body temperature. French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier discovered the Peltier effect phenomenon in 1834, which demonstrates that electricity can cause a heat difference at the junction of two different metals.

Wristify is essentially a series of junctions, powered by a small battery and attached to a bracelet. When the device is placed against your skin the temperature on your wrist gradually changes until your entire body thinks it’s warmer or cooler.

The benefit of the device is personal temperature control that is much more efficient than conventional heating and cooling methods. Millions of watts are used to heat and cool an entire building, but Wristify only requires a small lithium battery to run. The potential energy savings of such a technology could be huge.

Of course, Wristify is still just a prototype. But with colder temperatures on the way, causing you to bump up the thermostat, just imagine how an invention like this could help cut down your heating bill this winter.

Read more about Wristify at: http://wristifyme.com/

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