The sOccket: Energy-Generating Soccer Ball to Power Lamps and Save Lives in Africa

An average of 75% of the world watches Soccer and roughly 270 million people play soccer in the world. People are known to kick a soccer ball around for 8 hours a day. If you do the math, that’s roughly 2,160,000,000 hours a day of play.

As a class project in Harvard, students have invented an energy generating system called the sOccket. The sOccket is a soccer ball that generates and stores energy while it's being kicked around. For each 15 minutes of play, the ball can store enough energy to illuminate a small LED light for three hours. Based on the previous numbers, that sums up roughly to 25,920,000,000 hours of LED lighting a day, if everyone who kicked a soccer ball was kicking a sOccket. The team at Harvard is focusing their project on developing nations such as those in Africa where Soccer is often played. The idea behind the project is to replace kerosene lamps with LEDs. Kerosene lamps are extremely harmful to human health. When burned indoors, the effects of Kerosene are equivalent to inhaling two packs of cigarettes a day. Many deaths are associated with the inhalation of these fumes as well as fires generating from kerosene sources. LEDs will eliminate further complications for kerosene inhalation and generating fires. The sOccket has great potential in saving many lives for health and economical reasons in developing countries worldwide. Using a "buy one-give one" model, the sOccket team hopes to sell the ball as a tech gadget, targeting Western markets. The profits will be used to distribute the balls at little or no cost in poor countries through development organizations like Whizz Kids United. I myself am one hundred percent behind this. I don’t see any major flaws rather than the ball not being regulation but, that’s not a major issue and it can be corrected never the less.

To learn more please visit: http://www.soccket.com/