Since the production of smartwatches, technologists have been looking for more complicated interactions with the watch screen. Carnegie Mellon University’s SkinTrack enables users to turn their skin into a touchpad for controlling smartwatches.
Developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute’s Future Interfaces Group, the new system allows for continuous touch tracking on the hands and arms. It also can detect touches at discrete locations on the skin, enabling functionality similar to buttons or slider controls.
Yang Zhang, who’s a first-year Ph.D. student in HCII said:
“The great thing about SkinTrack is that it’s not obtrusive; watches and rings are items that people already wear every day,”.
He will present details of the technology May 10, 2016 at CHI 2016, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing, in San Jose, Calif. A video explaining the technology can be viewed on YouTube.
Because the smartwatches screens are so tiny and sometimes they are totally blocked by our finger, this seems to be a major problem, which led to the invention of SkinTrack.
“SkinTrack makes it possible to move interactions from the screen onto the arm, providing much larger interface,”
said Chris Harrison, assistant professor in the HCII and adviser to the research.
The user wears a ring that produces a high-frequency electrical signal. When the finger gets near to the skin or touches the skin, that signal propagates through the skin.
The researchers found that they could determine when the finger was touching the skin with 99 percent accuracy and they could resolve the location of the touches with a mean error of 7.6 millimeters
The system is still in upgrading process, it has some limitations like keeping the ring powered up. Signals also tend to change as the device is worn for long periods, due to sweat, hydration and the fact the body is in constant motion.
The technology is safe. No evidence showed any side effects. Such inventions can take us to a new era, and we’ll be excitingly waiting for such products to be sold in the market.
