Ampy is a charging device that can be attached to your body when you go for a run (or a walk) and it will generate energy that can be used to charge your mobile phone.

It’s about half the size of an average smartphone and uses a magnet that slides back and forth through a coil to convert the energy from moving around (kinetic energy) into electricity.

This electricity is stored in a battery that can then be used to power your devices via a USB connection.

“The more you move, the more power you get,” says chief product officer Alex Smith, who developed the device with two fellow engineering students at Northwestern University.



Just 30 minutes of jogging will produce enough charge to keep your smartphone going for three more hours. To generate the same amount of energy takes one hour of cycling or 10,000 steps of walking. You can even attach the device to your dog.

If you manage to completely charge up Ampy’s battery (with a lot of walking or running), you’ll have enough to charge your phone from dead to between 50 and 75 percent of its battery capacity.

There’s also an accompanying app that tells you how much energy you’ve generated.

You can pre-order Ampy on Kickstarter at the moment.

We’d like to see a time when the technology has been miniaturised so that it’s actually inside the gadgets that need power – particularly for products like smart watches, which are annoying to have to charge the whole time.