Devices with huge computational force and abilities can now be effectively carried on our bodies. On the other hand, their little size ordinarily prompts restricted collaboration space (e.g., minor screens, catches, and run wheels) and hence diminishes their ease of use and functionality. Since, we can't make screens and buttons bigger without losing the essential benefit of little size, we consider alternative methodologies that upgrade interactions with little versatile mobile systems. An alternative option is to find a suitable surface area in the environment for the interactive intentions. Case in point portrays a method that permits a little cell phone to transform tables into a gestural finger data canvas. On the other hand, tables are not even present, and in a versatile setting, users need to convey suitable surfaces with them. However, there exists a surface that happens to consistently transit with us, that’s our ‘skin’.
The exploration partnership between Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University has delivered a novel technique for physical communication or interaction, which focused on mobile devices such as mobile phones, iPods etc. , that utilize ‘skin’ as an info interface. This info interfacing method is known as “Skinput”. The innovative technology Skinput was developed by a Ph.D. student, Chris Harrison along with Microsoft research team. “Skinput, is an integration of some bio-acoustic sensors and machine learning languages, that helps people, to utilize their fingers, arms or any other part of their bodies as a track pad or touch pad to operate and control smart phones, iPods, or any other devices.
In the skinput technology, our skin can be used as an input surface. Skinput technology allows the human skin for acoustic transmission so that we can give inputs and information through our skin, to control the smart phones or other mobile devices like iPods, MP3 players, smart phones etc. Skinput, a novel user interface technique, which enables the skin to be used as a finger or touch input surface. In the skinput prototype, arm is the focused surface, because it provides significant area for interaction including a smooth and flat space for projection. When we tap on our body, a mechanical vibration produces. With the help of a novel array of sensors used in the armband of skinput, we can decide the area of ‘finger taps’ on the hand by resolving these mechanical vibrations that proliferate through our body parts. With skinput technology, we can utilize our own ‘skin’ as an input device, which is the human body’s largest organ.Using skinput technology, we can answer a call, only by tapping the thumb and the middle finger together. And by tapping on the forearm, we can go to the next song on an MP3 player or ipod.That is the skinput technology turns the human hand in to a virtual key board.
The finger taps on the skin produces various distinct forms of energies like acoustic energies. Among these acoustic energies, the most easily perceptible are the transverse waves. The transverse waves are generated by the replacement of the skin due to the finger tap smash.
During the propagation of energy through the surface of the arm, a few amount of energy spreads inwards, around the skeleton. These compressive or longitudinal waves transit through the delicate tissues of the arm and it stimulates the bone, which is considerably less deformable then the delicate tissue yet can react to mechanical agitation by rotating and interpreting as a rigid body. The soft delicate tissue surrounding the bone starts vibrates due to this mechanical excitation and as a result of this vibration new compressive or longitudinal wave starts propagating exterior to the skin. In the skinput technology, finger taps creates two different forms of conduction, the longitudinal waves transit into and out of the bones across the delicate tissues and the transverse waves moves straight along the surface of the arm. In this mechanism, the energy transfer will occurs at different frequencies along the distinctive distances. The energy can be carried out over longer distances through the bone conduction than the tissue conduction, also the higher frequencies transits more quickly over the bones than the delicate tissues.
The acoustic sensors used in the skinput connected to the upper arm, that captures the sound signals produced by tapping fingers or flicking fingers. These sound signals propagates as the transverse waves over the human skin and also by compressive or by longitudinal waves over the bones. Moreover, the hands and the forearm made up of very complex combination of bones that expands the acoustic discreteness of disparate locations.
In this Skinput, a wearable armband is developed for the acquisition of this acoustic information from the hand and forearm. The armband in the skinput can be used easily and also it is non-invasive.
In skinput, sensor arrays are used to determine the finger tap positions on the skin. According to the features of human body, the finger tapping on the muscles, bones and tendons creates different forms of vibrations. A bone conduction microphone is a suitable choice for skinput. This sensor is perfect for sensing the longitudinal waves and the transverse waves that generated due to the finger tapping. These bio acoustic and sensors captures and converts the acoustic energy (in the form of transverse and longitudinal waves) formed by the finger taps on the skin in to a digital signal information.
1. Arm band
2. Bluetooth connection
3. Pico Projector
The armband prototype used in the skinput contains the sensor arrays and a Pico-projector that are embedded in to the armband. The armband can superimpose the colored menus and buttons on to the user’s forearm, which helps the user to navigate along the menus. In addition to this projection, skinput provides an additional keypad projection on to the wearer’s palm.
The pico-projector used in the skinput, displays the images of menu and digital key boards on the forearms of a person. We can make calls or send a message by simply tapping on our forearm skin’s certain places, without taking Phone out of our pocket. The primary objective of the skinput technology is to provide a naturally feasible, always accessible on body finger input structure that eliminates the usage of other interfacing devices such as screens and other portable mobile input systems.
The Sensors and the bio acoustics are also connected to the Bluetooth of smart phones to transfer the information being carried out.
In skinput technology, we are using an armband, consists of two arrays of sensors (five sensing elements in each array). Also different resonant frequencies are set for each sensor arrays in order to effectively capture the acoustic signals transmitted through the bones. The upper sided sensor array is tuned to 25Hz, 27Hz, 30Hz, 38Hz and 78Hz frequencies and the lower array sensors are tuned to 25Hz, 27Hz, 40Hz, 44 Hz, and 64Hz frequencies.
In the skinput prototype system, we employ an audio interface (Mackie Onyx 1200F) to digitally capture the information from the sensor arrays in the armband. This audio interface was connected through a Firewire to the computer. In the computer there is a thin client composed in C interfaced with the gadget utilizing the Audio Stream Input/Output that is ASIO protocol. The sampling rate for each channel was set to 5.5kHz range. This diminished sampling rate makes the skinput approach easily convenient to embedded processors. Data is transferred through a local socket to our essential application, which is composed in java. Mainly three functions are performed by this java programs. The first one, it produces a live visualization of the signal or data from the sensor arrays. In second, the inputs from data stream are segmented in to independent taps or instances. The classification of these input instances is carried out in the third section.
We employed three input locations as shown in the figure to evaluate the result of skinput.
We can considerably improves the accuracy by crumpling (collapsing) the 10 locations in to a bigger groupings as shown in the figure below.
From the figure, it is clear that we can get a high accuracy at the six input points .The search disclose one credible, although capricious, blueprint with very high accuracy at 6 input points.
Harrison and his associate found that the tap on a fingertip, a tap on five finger point on the arm, or a tap on any one of the ten points on the forearm creates a peculiar acoustic data that machine learning programs which already programmed with experience, could learn and analyze the data. These computer programs are able to resolve the stamp of every type of finger tap by examining 186 various features of the bio acoustic input signals.
The processed information will be displayed on to the hand with the help of a Pico projector. The Pico projector used in the skinput technology will displays the menu of a smart phone or iPod in to our arm.
Skinput is an alternative methodology that upgrades interactions with little versatile mobile systems because it enables the skin to be used as a finger or touch input surface. So there is no need for devices like key board.Also using skinput, we can easily access our smart phone even though it is in pocket. Since skinput provides bigger buttons so there is less chance for selecting wrong buttons. Interactive gaming can be easily carried out using this skinput technology.
In the Skinput, there are limited numbers of finger tap position (approx. 6 positions) on the arm, that gives better performance. But to dial a phone number, we need at least ten buttons. Also the arm band used in skinput is bulky.
Through Skinput, a technological approach to use human body as an input surface is achieved. The wearable bioacoustic sensor array used in the skinput plays a fine role here. The Skinput approach is proved to be useful and better for different gestures when the body is in motion. As a future work, many features like taps with different parts of the finger, single handed gestures and differentiating between objects and materials are being explored and researched with Skinput. Last but not the least, the different applications of Skinput helps us to give a clear idea at what extent we can use this technology effectively. Likewise, Sixth sense also projects information on varied surfaces thus extending the limits of projection from screen to the physical world
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