Microsoft patents body power
I love this company. Thniking about innovation these days and noticed the excerpt below from http://www.zdnet.co.uk/
Microsoft has been awarded a patent for using human skin as a power conduit and data bus.
Patent No. 6,754,472, which was published Tuesday, describes a method for transmitting power and data to devices worn on the body and for communication of data between those devices.
Personal area networks -- or PANs -- are nothing new. Some, such as Bluetooth, use radio signals, while others use infrared. Some work has been done on near-field intrabody communications -- most notably by IBM's Almaden Research Labs, which at Comdex '96 demonstrated a prototype device that let two people exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands.
IBM's work, which was led by Thomas Zimmerman, took advantage of the natural salinity of the human body, which makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. IBM's device, which was the size of a pack of playing cards, used a current of one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp) -- lower than the natural currents already in the body -- to transmit data at the equivalent rate of an old 2400-baud modem, though speeds of up to 400,000 bits per second were mooted.
<what's "mooted"?>
Furthermore, said Microsoft, the physical resistance offered by the human body could be used to create a virtual keyboard on a patch of skin.