‘What if we rather focused on the temperature of each individual rather than the temperature of an entire building?’ – That was the question in which MIT Scientists and Engineers found them selves asking.

The costing involved trying to keep a building heated to a suitable temperature is substantial even if the climate is hot or cold. Heating costs is so high even with the fluctuating outside temperature because it has to work with two extremes. If the weather is extremely cold it would take lots of heating to bring the room up to a suitable temperature and if the climate was extremely hot the air conditioning would be pushed to the limits to keep the building cool. Many homes and companies use digital room thermostats to monitor the building temperature as a measure to control how much heat is needed in a room.

The recent increase of energy prices all over the UK has meant that the average annual cost of heating has increased from around £350 in 2008 to just over £600 now, while in the United States, they have the opposite problem where just over 16% of the country’s entire energy bill is air conditioning.

Many companies are trying to combat the cold and hot spells by using different methods to approach these conditions; a popular product that has been used is a heating timer. A heating timer automatically switches on and off the heating depending on the time and length you input into the system. This is highly beneficial as it means if you go out and forget to turn of the heating the heating timer will automatically switch it off for you.

However for the cold weather another product has been widely used called a frost protector. A frost protector basically does what the name suggests and heats a room or shed quickly to prevent frost from forming and causing disasters such as burst pipes.

The recent invention named Wristify is a ‘thermoelectric bracelet’ which sends pulses of either warm or cold waveforms to help heat or cool the body. As humans we often adapt to our surrounding and our body temperature is not just based on our temperature alone but also on our perception.

The Innovative Wristify team secured 1^st place at MIT Material-science design competition, and can now take the product past its prototype stage to the commercial stage.