A newly created flexible, biodegradable nanogenerator could lead to self-powered mobile phones, tablets and other portable devices.

The small device, which has been created by researchers from India and Germany, allows for everyday movements to be turned into electrical power.

A hand tapping on the nanogenerator can be seen to power more than 50 LEDs in a video (below) published alongside their research paper in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The technology means that it may be possible, once the technology has been scaled down, to be included in our electronic devices.

This could mean having a mobile phone that not only doesn’t need to plugged in to be charged, but could actually be charged by tapping on the screen – possibly even while texting.

“The researchers built a nanogenerator using a flexible, biocompatible polymer film made out of polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF,” says a press release on the ACS journal’s website.

“To improve the material’s energy-harvesting ability, they added DNA, which has good electrical properties and is biocompatible and biodegradable.”

The nanogenerator created by the researchers is the latest of a number of technologies that look to take power generation into our own hands.

Last year scientists in Korea created a thermoelectric generator, which generates enough electricity to power wearable technology from wasted body heat.

Another nanogenerator has been created to harvest energy from the rolling of tires.

However, with all these new innovative ways of creating energy there remains the problem that they are not – yet – able to generate enough power to be used on a commercial scale, or be integrated into devices.

For example, a typical LED needs around 30-60 milliwatts to be lit up, and it takes an hour and 50 minutes to fully charge an iPhone 6, using a 12 watt power adapter. That would be an awfully large amount of texting.

Some of these nanogenerators will, naturally, be developed to be more efficient, but it is probably going to be a long time before they are used in any of our devices.

“The NG is capable of harvesting energy from a variety of easily accessible mechanical stress such as human touch, machine vibration, football juggling, and walking,” says the research paper’s abstract.

“The NG exhibits high piezoelectric energy conversion efficiency facilitating the instant turn-on of several green or blue light-emitting diodes.

“The generated energy can be used to charge capacitors providing a wide scope for the design of self-powered portable devices.”

The research paper: DNA-Assisted β-phase Nucleation and Alignment of Molecular Dipoles in PVDF Film: A Realization of Self-Poled Bioinspired Flexible Polymer Nanogenerator for Portable Electronic Devices, can be found here.

Featured image courtesy of charnsitr / Shutterstock.com.