Improvement of energy harvested from the heat of the human body

A Recent interest in delivering better quality health care services is growing rapidly and leads to the development of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in the medical field. This network collects many sensors placed on the body of human. Since the sensor nodes are handled by batteries, they operate on limited power. Thus, improving the network lifetime through an efficient energy harvesting from the human environment has become a major research objective. Energy harvesting eliminates the maintenance such as replacing or recharging the battery. The present paper focuses on providing energy from heat body by using a thermoelectric generator (TEG). The energy produced from the difference in temperature between the hot and the cold sources (for example between the temperature of the human body, T
_H
= 37 °C and the temperature of the ambient air, T
_c
= 22 °C) results a limited efficiency. In order to maximize the power generated by such a system, we give a solution to improve the power harvested from human body.