If swiping at your smartphone at a meeting is rude, and staring at your smartwatch for a long time is weird, how about tapping on your thumbnail to discreetly send off that email?
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new device that users can wear on their fingernail to control their personal devices in times when it is considered uncivilized to pay more attention to a gadget than to people or when users have their hands full, such as when cooking or working on a construction project.
The thumbnail-sized NailO is a miniature trackpad composed of a layer of sensors, a circuit board, and a battery. On top of it all is a piece of nail art, which its makers say can be changed to fit the wearer's outfit, to make the device appear more presentable. Underneath that, however, the small, out-of-the-way device has a microcontroller, a capacitive sensor chip, and a Bluetooth radio chip that lets it transmit data to a smartphone or a computer.
"Because of its small size, it is very subtle and discreet. So let's say that today I want to subtly change the color of an accessory I'm wearing when I enter or exit a certain social scenario. I can very easily do that with my fingernail," said Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, a media arts and science graduate student at MIT and lead researcher for the NailO project. "And also because it's on your fingertip, this is a very natural and unobtrusive location. We have a lot of gestures using our fingers."
The device is currently in its prototype stages, and Hsin-Liu Kao and her team have developed the NailO to achieve up to a 92 percent accuracy rate when it comes to identifying five gestures programmed into its system. The researchers have developed an app that allows users to swipe on their thumbnails to input emoticons and punctuation as in a keyboard.
A few challenges are already underway. For instance, the researchers acknowledge that such a wearable device placed so close to the body would be prone to accidental gestural inputs, so they suggest including a two-second activation press before users can perform anything on the NailO.
There is also the notion that even a thumbnail device smaller than a quarter could still be a protruding annoyance for some users, thus the researchers plan to make the NailO even smaller. In fact, Artem Dementyev, co-lead researcher, says the team has already discussed plans with Chinese manufacturers to create small, powerful batteries that can power the NailO while still being half a millimeter thick.
"Our immediate goals are to further miniaturize the device," said Dementyev. "We want all the electronics in one chip, which would allow it to be thinner and smaller and reduce the power consumption."
The team hopes to release the nail art sticker-inspired NailO sometime in three years.
