New Material Responds to Touch Pressure

Vassily Overveight writes "CNN has an interesting article about a lightweight, malleable conductor named Peratech that can detect, measure and respond to a range of pressures "from the lightest touch to the heaviest hammer blow," and that can be incorporated into fabrics, plastics, and other solids. Listed potential applications include roll-up keyboards (hey, I have news for them: it's already been done) and clothing that monitors bodily functions." Hey its saturday, what do you want ;)

Comments

Just because it's been done, ...

[Speare]

... doesn't mean it can't be done better.

New: ceramic knives! Nah, stone tools have been done before.

New: silver halide photography! Nah, oil paintings by a master are better.

New: cloth rollup keyboard! Nah, thick rubber keyboards rule.

Sensitive buttons

[acceleriter]

Cool! Now we can have pressure sensitive buttons that report how hard they're being pushed--real applications could be things like speed control of a motor by button pressure. More fun things would be devices that say "OW" when people push the button too hard or that randomize the required pressure to activate the button.

No more light switches!

[ca1v1n]

I would absolutely love a patch that would go on my shirt or the edge of my pillow that would let me turn on and off lights, dial phone numbers (speakerphone required, of course) browse the web, etc, all from the laziness of my own bed.

Ok, tech companies. You have demand, go make it so we can buy it.

Re:No more light switches!

[ckedge]

> I would absolutely love a patch that would go on my shirt or the edge of
> my pillow that would let me turn on and off lights, dial phone
> numbers (speakerphone required, of course) browse the web, etc,

I'd like to be a fly on the wall the first night you're fitfully tossing and turning in your sleep :)

my mind must be in the gutter

[gtx]

why do i get the feeling that i'm going to, in the not so distant future, be reading about a product incorporating this material in the back of dirty magazines as the new alternative to phone sex?

Robot skin

[Reality Master 101]

Actually, I think the more interesting use for materials like this is giving tactile feedback to robots. That would go a long way to make them able to pick up delicate items.

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Re:Robot skin

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the study of haptics. Sensory perception might seem like a straight-forward application, but it is loaded with tricky details and requires massive processing. Eg: a cm^2 finger tip can be modelled with a 70x70 grid of sensors sampled at 500Hz. Now for each sample factor in a non-linear scaling and try to account for deformed surfaces. Throw in some temporal filtering. Then aggregate the individual sensors into hierarchies. Then try to detect motion or shapes across the sensors. Now try and do all that across a surface area as large as the human body!

Application in body mechanics

[64.28.67.48]

Think of this - make an entire NFL uniform out of small cells of this stuff, and a little box that transmits a map of the forces experienced by each cell over the surface of the uniform. Then you could superimpose a color-coded force map over the footage of the player wearing the uniform and see the forces experienced in, say, a receiver getting slammed by the safety in a slant over the middle.

Maybe this stuff could be used to improve protection for athletes, automobile drivers, jet-fighter pilots, and that Aussie Crocodile Hunter guy.

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Re:Hmmm...

[blakestah]

"New Material Response to Touch Pressure". Yeah, it's called piezoelectric materials, and they were discovered during the time that Plato and those cool Romans were out sprinking their food with lead to get a buzz.


Piezoelectics are brittle, but more importantly they are displacement sensors with a range that extends sometimes up to a mm. They also yield high voltage low current signals.

The cloth described changes conductance with material strain. This allows a much broader range of sensitivity, and a much wider variety of uses. For example, why aren't piezoelectrics used in keyboards ?? The answer is cost. It costs to have high voltage circuitry, and the cost of just a few keys would be more than a current keyboards is worth.

The potential for consumer applications is enormous, ranging from sensing body position to interfaces like keyboards.

Yes, it is new

[John Jorsett]

Piezoelectric materials are brittle and thus limited in how they can be used. This stuff is essentially metallic particles coated with a conductive polymer, and can be used in a variety of ways. Their claim to uniqueness is that no matter how high the metallic loading, conductive paths aren't formed. More info here.

Some application ideas...

[ltcordelia]

• tactile sensors for remote operations of unmanned vehicles
• sensors for martial sports (fencing, karate, boxing ("oh my god, Mike Tyson just bit his opponent's ear with the force of a hyena!"))
• input devices for wearable computing (after you tap one spot with sufficient pressure, the rest of the keyboard on your pant legs activates).
• biomonitoring (adaptive gel shoe soles that register how hard you are jogging; chairs that provide support based on your seating preferences)
• intelligent furniture (it shouts/emits a high-pitched squeal whenever a pet is on it)
• Giant dance floors that trigger odd sound/lighting combos (anyone remember coley groups from Shockwave Rider
• Soldier/Policeman status monitoring (a layer of this placed inside their clothing/vests would alert whenever the wearer had been assaulted)
• Office cube walls that are input devices as well (embedded phones, temperature controls, etc)

Okay, that's the end of my two minutes of brainstorming.

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