15 yr boy creates shoes that charge your cell phone?

A 15 year old boy may have found the solution to charging that all electric energy hog – your smart phone and solved obesity issues as well.

A 15-year-old boy’s thirst for science has helped him developed shoes that can charge your cell phone or any USB-powered device by simply walking. That is correct – walking!

Generating Electricity By Walking - Google Science Fair 2014


Angelo Casimiro lives in the Philippines, a country still recovering from last fall's Typhoon Haiyan.

"A lot of people are still suffering from poverty," he says in a YouTube video in which he demonstrates his invention. Some people have no access to electricity, he adds. For them, "a simple source of light is big," he says.

Now Angelo is creating a new way to generate power. He placed two pairs of piezo-electric discs on the insole of each shoe. The discs produce energy when any type of pressure is placed on them. That energy is then channeled to a USB port, which an electronic device can plug in to.

"My insole generator does not use coils, motors, magnets, or anything that involves moving parts," he explains. "We have a pair (of physio-electric discs) mounted back-to-back. When you make back-to-back pairs, you're able to harvest twice the power."

Even without the extra discs, Angelo's experiments with the device showed that a full battery charge could be obtained by jogging continuously for eight hours. In a separate test, the teenager gained a 10-minute phone charge by playing basketball for two straight hours.