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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 07 2018, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the freckle-mistaken-for-a-radio-button dept.

They are similar to ultra-thin patches, their shape can be freely chosen, and they work anywhere on the body. With such sensors on the skin, mobile devices like smartphones and smartwatches can be operated more intuitively and discreetly than ever before. Computer scientists at Saarland University have now developed sensors that even laypeople can produce with a little effort. The special feature: the sensors make it possible, for the first time, to capture touches on the body very precisesly, even from multiple fingers. The researchers have successfully tested their prototypes in four different applications.

[...] The sensor, named Multi-Touch Skin, looks similar in structure to the touch displays that are well known from smartphones. Two electrode layers, each arrayed in rows and colums, when stacked on top of each other, form a kind of coordinate system, at whose intersections the electrical capacitance is constantly measured. This is lowered at the point where fingers touch the sensor, because the fingers conduct electricity and therefore allow the charge to drain away.

These changes are captured at each point, and thus touches from multiple fingers can be detected.

[...] The usefulness of this new freedom of form is made particularly clear by one of the four test prototypes, each of which the scientists produced with their novel fabrication methods: Since this sensor is similar in form to an ear, it is placed on the back of a test participant‘s right ear. The participant can swipe upward or downward on it, in order to use it as a volume control. Swiping right or left changes the song being played, while touching with a flat finger stops the song.

For the Saarbrücken scientists, Multi-Touch Skin is further proof that research into on-skin interfaces is worthwhile. In the future, they want to focus on providing even more advanced sensor design programs, and to develop sensors that capture multiple sensory modalities.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday May 07 2018, @06:54PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday May 07 2018, @06:54PM (#676740)

    From what I can tell the sensor stickers allow touch interfaces to be *attached* to the human body (or most anything else, presumably), but do not actually use the body as an input device. As contrasted to some of the other experimental technology over the years that has used acoustic vibrations, etc. to detect touches on the skin itself.

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