NNWN/30/12/2022

Soon keyboard will become a thing of the past. Believe it or not if researchers from South Korea have developed spray on smart skin which enables typing without a keyboard.  This has become possible after they used meta-learning electric skin technology that enables typing without a keyboard. This is for the first time that such a thing has become a reality.Published in Nature Electronics, a monthly online peer-review journal, the study would bring a revolution in the field of typing on keyboard of a computer.

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT recently said that the scientists have come up with a “spray on smart skin”, the new scheme. The scientists included Jo Sung-ho, a computing professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ko Seung-hwan, a mechanical engineering professor at Seoul National University and Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford. 

 How did research team conduct research?

According to koreaherald, researchers have worked diligently to develop the process. They sprayed electrically-sensitive liquid on the skin to automatically print electrically-sensitive nanometers-thick-mesh stretching from the forearm to the back of the hand. The mesh caused electric signals as the movement of the hand made the mesh stretch or shrink. The electric signals were received by a Bluetooth module, which was attached to the end of the mesh on the forearm. The gathered information was transmitted to the computer wirelessly, according to Koreaherald.com.

The researchers allowed the computer’s artificial intelligence learn different movements of the hand. They eventually confirmed that various work can be done in the virtual space after a few trials of certain movements. The researchers have managed to type on a computer with only hand movements and without a keyboard after the spray-on smart skin learned how the hands and fingers moved when the person used the keyboard to type certain words.

Researchers said that new scheme was also able to draw an object on the screen by just touching the object with the hands that had the spray-on smart skin. According to Korea’s Science Ministry that existing devices with electric skin technology are mostly large and lack flexibility, and that their structures have limitations in responding to numerous joint issues in the human body.

The ministry pointed out that this study increased the versatility of future wearable devices as the electric sensors that can be directly sprayed onto the skin. According to researchers, it is first case that combines the technologies of electric skin and cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Both the (newly developed) hardware and software increased the user convenience to bring technological innovation in the fields of the metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, remote treatment and robot engineering in the future.  If this becomes a reality, then the virtual keyboard will bring a revolution in the way computers are handled.