MIT Wristband Is a Personal Climatizer

rcastro0 writes "What looks like a CPU's heat sink worn around the wrist apparently may be able to make you feel cool even while it is hot — or warm while it is cold. As Wired reports, this termoelectric device explores human physiology and how we perceive temperature to fool our body and make us comfortable. The device is called Wristify, and Mashable has a video."

Body hacking

[rwa2]

DARPA was working on something similar to this. It was a special glove that actively drew blood to the surface of the skin on your hand and cooled it:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html [wired.com]
Looks like someone managed to commercialize it: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/cgi-bin/gforum.cgi?post=4495810 [slowtwitch.com]

Anyway, your hands and toes are already your body's natural radiators, since they have a relatively high surface-area to volume ratio. Your body can already regulate its temperature naturally by pumping more blood into the capillaries near the surface of the skin when it needs to cool off more. As it mentions in the Wired article, simply applying a cold heat sink won't really work, since your body tends to draw blood circulation away from contact with cold surfaces, so you'd also need the pump or something to force the blood circulation back towards the heat sink.

When I do martial arts, I find I get the best cooling by simply swinging my hands back and forth. That gives me forced convection through my fingers, combined with enhanced evaporative cooling of my sweaty palms, while the extra centripetal acceleration draws blood out closer to my fingertips.

There's another similar body hack for those of us with trouble regulating your temperature while sleeping and tend to overheat and start sweating under your blankets: simply sleep with your hands and/or feet sticking out from under the blanket. This will let your body better regulate its core temperature using its natural mechanisms of pumping more blood closer to the skin for more cooling, or drawing blood away from the skin to retain heat and maintain proper core temperature. Hey, it's this "one simple weird trick" for better sleep, on the internet... who would have thunk it?

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct link [slashdot.org]

"device explores human physiology"

[Anubis IV]

And this summary explores human tolerance for dupes of stories that have already been posted [slashdot.org].

I live in Vietnam...

[wisebabo]

And this would be such a great thing for my level of comfort, I'd love to try it.

There's only one thing, I'd have to be sure it isn't fooling (or not too much) the body's thermo-regulation system. I'd hate to die of heat stroke because my brain thought my core temperature was 98.6F when actually it was 106F.

Anyway perhaps this is actually (very efficiently!) lowering or raising the core body temperature. I understand that someone discovered that the past (current?) method of cooling off NFL football players, dunking their heads in ice cold water, was counterproductive. It causes the capillaries in the face/head to constrict REDUCING heat transfer when you want to increase it. Thus someone came up with a box that applied a partial vacuum to the hands which (combined with some cold water) efficiently reduced their temperature. Hopefully this device works using this principle (and perhaps the DARPA gloves do the same).

Anyone know if this is a perceived or actual control of body temperature?

Re:Body hacking

[jamesh]

Another way to cool off in hot weather is to wet your arms down with cold water but not dry them off. The water will evaporate, drawing heat out of your arms in some natural air conditioning.

At night before we had any form of cooling i'd put our top sheet in the washing machine on rinse and then spin it enough so it wouldn't drip. With the ceiling fan on fairly low it generated enough evaporative cooling that we could get a good nights sleep. Of course if it was hot and humid we just ended up feeling yuck, but most of the heat here is fairly dry.