SkinTrack turns lower arm into touchpad

Called SkinTrack and developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute’s Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University, the new system allows for continuous touch tracking on the hands and arms. The university further claims that it can detect touches at discrete locations on the skin, enabling functionality similar to buttons or slider controls.

Previous “skin to screen” approaches have employed flexible overlays, interactive textiles and projector/camera combinations. SkinTrack requires only that the user wear a ring, which propagates a low-energy, high-frequency signal through the skin when the finger touches or nears the skin surface.

“The great thing about SkinTrack is that it’s not obtrusive; watches and rings are items that people already wear every day,” said Yang Zhang, a first-year Ph.D. student in HCII. He will present details of the technology May 10 at CHI 2016, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing, in San Jose, California.