Wristify: Thermal Comfort via a Wrist Band
Baku, November 7 (AZERTAC). Can’t get the room temperature just right? Whether you are wrangling with your family or workmates, getting a comfortable environment can be difficult. And expensive—building heating and cooling amount to some 16.5 percent of U.S. primary energy consumption.
A team of MIT students and alumni has a new low-cost solution: Wristify, a wrist cuff that allows individuals to maintain a comfortable body temperature independent of their environment. In essence, their thermoelectric bracelet monitors air and skin temperature and then responds with pulses of hot or cold waveforms to the wrist.
The Wristify team recently won first prize and $10,000 in MIT’s Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition (MADMEC)—that’s after months of development and 15 prototypes.
Co-inventor Sam Shames ’14, a materials science and engineering senior, shared what’s next for the team in this Slice of MIT interview. Other co-inventors include graduate students Mike Gibson ’12 and David Cohen-Tanugi SM ’12 and postdoc Matt Smith PhD ’12.
We first made the discovery from using our prototype. In particular, Matt Smith noticed that the device was more comfortable when using it in a manual pulsing mode, switching it on and off at controlled intervals. We all tried the bracelet in this mode and agreed with Matt’s discovery. This led to the literature review on human thermal perception and the finding that supported that discovery, which in turn led us to incorporate automatic pulsing into the prototype.
Right now, in addition to continuing technical development—we have several ideas of how to further improve our device—we are making an intensive effort on the business side, looking into how best to leverage our resources to continue development and eventually bring this product to market.
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