| Pop-Sci Core77 Design Challenge/ Description MEMORY 7/16/03 |
| Description of Design | |
Digital tattoos A wireless personal area network server and sensor network facilitate the display of emotional information on a user's skin through use of digital tattoos. Description: Knowing the emotional state of others is an important social skill. Some individuals excel at the subtle art of reading expression in the face and body. But to others less skilled, or individuals with Asperger Syndrome (high functioning autism), the signs are completely unreadable without a context. Yet context isn't always meaningful. Imagine you are studying algebra in the library and before long your mind wanders. Think of a sad memory and tears may may well up. Recalling a romantic evening may make your cheeks flush. Onlookers may be confounded as to how algebra can elicit such emotion! Semiotic body decorations such as tattoos are expressive but are permanent. How much more spontaneous and timely it would be to display transient tattoos to more clearly promulgate both recalled emotional events or current emotional states to others ... perhaps even datamine the record and display to yourself the date or place when you last felt that way. Like earlier work on changeable tattoos1, digital tattoos employ the microcapsule sphere display technologies of digital ink, examples of which include eInk2 and Gyricon Media3. However, rather than painfully implant or inject the ink below the epidermis it is instead applied to the skin surface in three successive applications of a breathable cyanoacrylate film matrix similar to Liquid Bandage®4. First a matrix with conductive microrods is applied. A powered pad that aligns the microrods with an EM field is placed over the skin for a minute until the matrix is dry. This is followed by applying a layer of digital ink matrix followed by another layer of conductive matrix aligned orthogonal to the first. When suspended between electrically charged grids the ink spheres will display as either white, black or gray. Digital ink uses very low power and displays an image even when the power is turned off. Each sphere is about the diameter of a human hair and contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. Digital tattoos are the display component of a system also consisting of up to three sensor-transponders detecting EEG and EMG bioelectrical signals and a small, low-power wireless personal area network (WPAN) server5. The sensor is attached to the skin with a medical dry electrode employing fuzzy logic6 to interpret neural signatures related to emotional states. The signature data is sent to and stored in the WPAN server which in turn sends data to the digital tattoos. The WPAN server synchronizes with a PDA allowing for uploading of new calendar data, display drivers and display imagery selectable through the WPAN's "flex interface"7. 1. USPO 6,192,890 Levy, et al 2. http://www.eink.com 3. http://www.gyriconmedia.com 4. http://www.bandaid.com/liquid_bandage.shtml 5. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/ 6. Lusted, H.S. and Knapp, R.B. Controlling computers with neural signals. Scientific American, vol. 275, no. 4 (Oct.), pp. 82-87, 1996. 7. http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/IL/members/schwesig/subcontents/ |