What is curious about reports like this is that all (at least all that I've seen) only involve Nokia phones and many of them focus on third party batteries as the culprit. Nokia offers press releases showing how they spend huge sums on safety and design and imply that only their batteries are truly safe.
Exotic batteries store large amounts of energy and some of these accidents are awful - a young woman in the Netherlands was apparently horribly disfigured. We are getting close to the limits of what chemical batteries can supply. The alternatives are moving to fuel cells (with their own problems), designing devices that require less energy or doing something novel (Rich Howard and I used to chat about small nuclear batteries (specifically tritium beta decay - probably tritiated titanium foils and betavoltaic conversion) , but that would be very impractical at this point).
I keep coming back to the idea of a communication web spread across the body with antennas in the right place (away from the head), batteries near the person's center of gravity (belts/fanny packs, etc) and input output devices where appropriate. The i/o could be connected to the computation and radio modules with a very low power/low range network (there are many candidates). The trick is to get this considered fashion and as important as a purse or wallet.
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