Wearable Turns Thumbnail into Trackpad From: Product Design & Development - 11/17/2015 According to Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, an MIT graduate student and lead author of NailO: Fingernails as an Input Surface, a paper describing the system, the technology could allow users to control wireless devices when their hands are full. "For example, if both your hands are busy cooking, but you need to navigate a mobile device, NailO could be used like a third hand," says Kao. NailO involves multilayered miniaturized hardware that wirelessly transmits data via Bluetooth to a mobile device or PC. The hardware is then mounted on the thumbnail with cosmetic nail tape. The researchers designed NailO to use projected capacitance to sense finger touch gestures, in which the capacitance is measured on each electrode independently. When touched, a capacitor is formed between the finger and the sensing electrode, and capacitance is sensed indirectly by charging and discharging a resistor-capacitor (RC) circuit. Read the entire article at: http://www.pddnet.com/article/2015/11/tiny-wearable-turns-thumbnail-trackpad http://digital.pddnet.com/productdesignanddevelopment/november_december_2015?pg=1#pg1 (Page 28) Links: Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao http://cindykao.com NailO: Fingernails as an Input Surface http://cindykao.com/NailO Thumbnail track pad (with video 2:08) http://news.mit.edu/2015/wearable-thumbnail-sensor-controls-digital-devices-0417 Not related: Finger-mounted reading device for the blind http://news.mit.edu/2015/finger-mounted-reading-device-blind-0310