Blood vessel energy harvester

Recently professor Zhong Lin Wang et.al from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech have recently demonstrated a novel energy harvester.
Blood flow or the contraction of blood vessels inside the body are used to create energy using piezoelectric harvesting.

[Link]
[Link to research group]

Panel discussion about Energy Harvesting

I just came across a video of a panel discussion about energy harvesting including loads of remarks about MEMS harvesters. Amongst the group discussing are representatives of Perpetuum, TI, and EnOcean.
Very interesting to watch as it includes a lot of information about where the harvesting industry has come to by now, what is possible and where things are going.

[Link to Video]

Newest Energy Scavenging Approach

For quite a while the idea of powering mobile device using energy harvesting has been around.
The main problem with this so far has been the small power that could be generated with these harvesting circuits.
Some researchers have now presented a new approach that might make this more feasible in the future. It is based on piezoelectric zinc-oxide nanowires aound 2-3 um in diameter.
Due to their small dimensions these nanowires promise a power generation per volume significantly higher than achieved with current techniques.

[Link]