Most people have been in a situation where air conditioners result in at least one person being fried or frozen thanks to a different tolerance to temperatures. A groups of MIT engineers have been working on the problem and they claim to have hit on a solution: a personal cooling product called Wristify.
Currently in the prototype stages, the Wristify product uses a small personal cooler that is worn on the user’s wrist and cools their overall body temperature. Wristify makes use of a Peltier cooler, seen in some computer graphics cards, to cool the user’s wrist at intervals of a few seconds. Peltier coolers use electrical current to transfer heat from one location to another, in this case from the wrist to the cooler’s fins. The end result is that the user feels cooler overall, with only minimal reductions in heat in a specific bodily location.
The folks behind the project are still tweaking temperature drops, looking for an optimal reduction period, but the concept recently won MIT’s Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition (MADMEC) and the cash prize that goes along with it. Should the Wristify become a commercial product, it could lead to a lot fewer arguments over the office aircon.
Source/Image: via Digital Trends