United States. Embr Labs is a startup founded by three MIT PhD students who were frustrated by the fact that their lab was always frozen during the summer, even when there were only a few people in the building.
Wouldn't it make sense, they thought, to provide cooling devices to each individual within the lab instead of using incredible amounts of energy to cool vast spaces? His solution is a small $299 device called the Embr Wave that he wears on the inside of his wrist. At the push of a button, a ceramic plate next to your skin gets very cold, giving you some relief by targeting the sensitive thermoreceptor nerves inside your wrist. The company claims that because Embr would allow people to cool themselves rather than their entire office or home, it could translate into energy savings of between 15% and 35% of a building's overall cooling costs.
A 2018 study at UC Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment found that Embr Wave can help people feel up to five degrees more comfortable.
Creating a portable device that can cool you down is incredibly difficult, mainly due to the laws of physics: if you're going to do something cold, you have to make something else hot. That's why window air conditioning units stick out of the window: they can expel hot air from the interiors of a building, while expelling cold air inside. "When you get smaller, especially if you want to be portable, it becomes harder and harder to dissipate that heat," says Sam Shames, co-founder and COO of Embr. There's also another problem: it takes a lot more energy to cool something than it does to heat something. As a result, cooling devices are generally large, bulky and noisy, all because the cooling process is inherently inefficient.
That's why Embr Wave, as well as Sony's Reon Pocket (see news), use a peculiarity of materials science called the Peltier effect to provide intense cooling sensations in a smaller form. In the 1830s, French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier discovered that if an electric current passes through a junction between a metal and a semiconductor (the same material found in electronics today), it can create a cooling effect. If you run the current in the other direction, it produces heat. Today, devices that use this effect, called thermoelectrics, can be found in everything from heated car seats to wine coolers. This is how the Mars Rover cooled, and powers the cooling and heating of the International Space Station.
To make the Embr Wave more efficient, the startup team designed the thermoelectric device so that it only targets the temperatures to which the human body responds best. Because the temperature sensations are relative, the device does not need to be close to the freezing point to feel cold, it just has to be a little colder than the normal temperature of the human body. The temperature of the device rises and falls slowly, thanks to a proprietary algorithm that changes the temperature enough to produce a cooling sensation while preserving the battery. Embr's team says it can run the device's two- to three-minute cycles up to 50 times on a single charge.
