Skin Stretch Finger Track Pad

Abstract

In this project, I'm going to develop two fingers input device. In recent years, human conputer interface researchers have developed the user interfaces to interact with computer with many ways.

Conputer input without any mechanical devices enable us to use computer resources in the anywhere and anytime. For example, when we are in the kitchen and want to refer the cooking recipe site, we don't want to touch smartphone or PC with wet and oily hand. Therefore, human computer interface that allow to input with our body is one of the hot research topic in these days.

So far, researchers have developed skin input devices. "Skinput" is the one of the computer interface that uses bio-acoustic sensing to localize finger taps on the skin. They analyze mechanical vibration that propagate thorogh body. Skinput shows that our body skin has machanical resonance frequency, and when we change the posture of our parts of body, applyed vibration to our skin has different frequency component.

R.Ono et al developed "palm+Act" which captured the appearance of the palm and finger and estimate the applied force from finger. They used estimated applied force for computer input. Y.Makino inplemented "Tangential Force Sensing System" which has two photo reflectice sensor and sense another hand's finger pressure.

These researches shows new sensing method of input from skin. However, These device can use when our two hands are available. In our daily life, we always use tool that allow to use one hand.

"Sensing Touch Force using Active Acoustic Sensing" is that they applyied vibration to finger and sensed with piezo sensor and estimate force with acoustic frequency component changing.

Yet, skin stretch sensing on finger pad is still ongoing research.

In this project, I use add high frequency vibration to finger and sensing finger posture change with analying vibration from piezo sensor that is mount on different places on skin. Also, I use this posture change for computional input.