Bendy battery lets you wear gadgets' power supply

[Nipuna]

I'm wearing my party lights, unplugged (Image: Bryan Helm/Corbis)

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BATTERIES are going round the bend. A flexible, lithium-ion battery can fit inside the cable for your earphones so you can wear it round your neck.

Developed by a team at Pusan National University in South Korea, the battery is made from electrode strands coiled into a hollow core and surrounded by an outer electrode tube. It could make future gadgets lighter because they will no longer need an integrated battery. Flexible displays or wearable electronics will be less bulky too. It might mean you can wear your power source on the wrist, round your neck or any another part of the body, its creators say.

In tests, a prototype continuously operated a red LED screen and iPod Shuffle even when researchers tied the battery in a knot. Je Young Kim of Korean firm LG Chem and a co-creator of the device, says the battery can power a small MP3 player for up to 10 hours and provide 5 minutes of emergency calls from a cellphone (Journal of Advanced Materials, doi.org/fz5rg5).

The team's goal is to have the battery ready for mass production by 2017, for use in MP3 players or as emergency back-up power for cellphones. "This may be the first cornerstone of the wearable energy era," says Kim.