Out of the Box Thinking: Wearable Air Conditioner

Summer is here. For anyone who lives where excessively high temperatures and/or humidity combine to make the season a miserable one, that can mean a lot of sweating and personal discomfort.

Air conditioning technology makes many of these places tolerable, but that comes with a price. Because most these machines are big and bulky, using them to keep cool means having to spend a lot of time indoors. Because they use a lot of electricity, even so-called portable air conditioners are designed to continuously plugged in to cool single rooms. They’re only portable in the sense you can move them from one room to another.

But what if you could have your own personal battery-powered air conditioner? One you could take everywhere you go, including outside? Core77 describes one such product now being produced by Sony:

To stay warm in a cold space, you can either heat the entire space, or save money on energy by throwing on extra layers. But there is no opposite money-saving tactic for staying cool in a hot space.

Sony engineer Kenji Ito aims to change that. He invented the Reon Pocket, Sony’s wearable personal air conditioner. It’s essentially a tiny heat pump that creates temperature differentials using semiconductors. It’s worn at the base of one’s neck, and a metal plate resting against the skin transmits cool. While it won’t change your body’s core temperature, the device can cool your local skin temperature by an astonishing 25°F / 14° C.

The following video introduces Sony’s wearable air conditioner:

The device works by using the Peltier effect, which uses electricity to generate temperature differences in circuits made of different materials, with one material becoming warmer as the other becomes colder. Or vice versa, since the heating/cooling effect on the materials can be reversed with the throw of a switch.

The device is already on the market in Japan and Europe, and will become available in the U.S. through Sony’s online store sometime this summer. At this writing, U.S. pricing has yet to be set, but a unit will likely cost around $350 based on the announced pricing for Europe.