14 DAY TRIAL // Standard wearables today will help you receive notifications on your wrist or track your calorie consumption or the number of steps you've taken, but if that's not nearly exciting for you, listen to this.
A group of interns working in the Intel Collaborators program are developing a system called human body communications (HBC) to share data between two devices by virtue of touching a sensor while having a wearable device on.
Imagine using your body to transfer data
While most of us have thought of wearables working in concert with smartphones, they might actually prove to be really effective when used with a PC or a laptop too, through HBC.
Human body communications has been around for some time, under terms such as body area networks, body coupled communications and intra-body communications.
What researchers are trying to do is use the human body as a medium to transfer data between computers, by virtue of the electromagnetic field surrounding us all.
The idea behind the whole experiment is said to be simple in itself. Basically, you will perform a copy / paste action using a particular touch interface. Placing two fingers on the sensor will move the files through the magnetic field via an electrical signal to the wearable device (in this case it’s a ring).
Once the info is stored in the ring, one can go to a similarly enabled device and perform the same action (placing two fingers on the sensor) in order to copy the info into the laptop. You can see how this is easily achieved in the video demonstration below.
As you can spot in the clip, the ring is a prototype, but there’s a catch to the whole situation. For the time being, one can’t transfer more than a few bytes of information. But if the technology will be refined in the future, the implications are quite huge.
Info sharing will be made easier in the future thanks to wearables
Imagine being able to print from your smartphone or tablet by virtue of a few touch gestures. Another application might be picking up geo coordinates from a mapping application and touching a GPS device to swiftly transmit the location.
The team said it had to face challenges related to finding ways of dealing with power loss that goes through the human body.
To that end, they fine-tuned electric circuits made up of capacitors and inductors so they could build up a stable connection to transfer the data. This has to happen quite quickly and users will not have to press their fingers on the touchpad longer than a second.
Current smart ring products aren't all that creative. Basically, they are just tiny, shrunken smartwatches that can buzz when you have received a notification, but smart rings capable of sending info by virtue of touching a sensor would certainly be something.
