New communication protocol invented that allows skin vibrations for sending an electronic message. Scientists from Purdue University in the US have developed a new communication technology that enables users to send messages in English by using vibrations in their skin.
The technology was developed on the basis of a challenge proposed by Facebook, a company that wanted to find out whether it was really possible to send messages through a person’s skin,” said Hong Kong Z. Tan, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the institution and lead author of the study. With this in mind, his research team has worked on it and now proved that it is feasible.
Technically, it is a device that reproduces a specific vibration that has previously been assigned to the corresponding English phoneme, or in this case the smallest sound unit located in the forearm of the user who will send the message. The vibrations are therefore tuned to the formation of phonemes in the mouth of the user.
The press release on technology states that speaking the letter “p” or the letter “b”, noises occurring in the front of the mouth produce a specific vibration in the person’s wrist, while the letters “k” or “g” generated in the back of the mouth also generate other vibrations in the elbow area.
Furthermore, the researcher Tan said that they have encoded the procedure to generate different sensations depending on the speech characteristic, such as vowels, consonants, sounds without and with voice, short or long vowels. In this sense, stationary vibrations are represented by consonant sounds and “moving” sensations by vowels.
According to Tan, he started the research with a small group of phonemes and then trained the users with up to 500 words. They showed variable performance, but those who had completed the process picked up one word in English for every minute.
Scientists say that this technology could serve as an alternative communication method because users only need a few hours to learn the vibrations associated with each sound.