Yet another man machine interface
By Mitch on Friday, 15 March 2013, 13:48 - Misc - Permalink
Until the early 2000's, the mouse used to rule as absolute king over other man machine interfaces.
Since then, touchpads, touchscreens, touchless peripherals like the kinect and other devices have appeared and conquered large territories of mouse kingdom.
The last finding in this explosion of new devices is a gesture control peripheral: the Myo. Developed by a Canadian company, it is a brace that is placed around the forearm. The brace contains sensors that detects movements:
- translations and rotations of the arm, probably with MEMS,
- plus apparently moves of muscles inside the arm that are interpreted to deduce moves of the hand.
This is an astounding idea! The company has surely sent a lot of money and engineer's time to develop this device. I see immediate applications in the field of surgery or other medical applications where sterility is important and can be preserved with such device.
If a surgeon has to touch the mouse or the touchscreen of a computer to view medical data, his hands "losses" sterility. With such device, no concern about sterility. It is preserved and the surgeon can open, view, scroll, zoom-in zoom-out with dedicated movements.
Some may say that the kinect already allows to do so. But the kinect has its drawbacks: the doctor has to be in front of the kinect to be detected and the kinect emits IR waves that can disturb other medical devices.
I don't put the link to the myo website here; you'll probably find it easily with your favorite search engine.
BTW, Remember that mice are the most intelligent life form on planet earth!
