In a bid to capture and exploit wasted heat, a consortium of Japan’s biggest companies plans to use body warmth generated by lazing around into energy for powering TV remotes. The “energy scavenging” campaign has been formed by 23 Japanese companies, including bitter rivals Honda and Toyota, with the aim of filling homes, offices and cars with electronic devices that can power themselves.

As well as heat, even the smallest movements of the most determined couch potato, according to Japanese researchers, could be converted into useful energy for powering a battery-free TV remote or video games controller. The world leader in vibration capture technology is the British company Perpetuum, a spin-off of Southampton University.

Its president and founder Roy Freeland said: “Energy harvesting can produce lots of gimmicks - shoes that light up when you walk on them, or a television remote that works when you shake it - but when it comes to real applications we’re talking machine-to-machine, where harvested energy is going to be powering electronics in the kind of places where you don’t really want to go to change a battery.”

The exceptionally rare alliance was formed as corporate Japan scrambles to retain its reputation for cutting-edge technology. The decision to collaborate, analysts said, is a panicky reaction to Japan’s declining dominance of the electronic component market. The climate of concern grew worse over the weekend when the Taiwanese giant Foxconn Technology cut its long-term growth forecasts by half and declared the “maturity” of the consumer electronics market. (Heraldsun)