German student Nicole Schmiedel has come up with a design for a trendy-looking wristwatch that contains an innovative ultra-light insulin pump to help people with type 1 diabetes.
The watch produces its own electricity thanks to the use of piezo-electric technology originally developed for European satellites.
A prototype of the novel insulin pump wristwatch named COR won one of the three Design and Technology Student Awards at this year's MATERIALICA trade fair in Munich.
It was presented for business professionals at this year's European Space Technology Transfer Conference, an initiative of ESA's Technology Transfer Programme Office.
Inside COR a piezo-electric transducer absorbs the energy of even the slightest movement of the person who wears it and converts it into electricity to drive the insulin pump.
The transducer is based on those developed for space programmes where they are used in micro-positioning and vibration damping of optics embedded on satellites, such as those incorporated in the MIDAS instrument onboard ESA's Rosetta comet chaser.
"I got the idea for the insulin pump wristwatch when I watched a film of a little 8-year old girl with diabetes using an insulin pump and saw what she had to go through to get her daily doses of insulin," recalls Nicole Schmiedel, an industrial design student at the Braunschweig University of Arts in Germany.
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