Student uses skin as input for mobile devices

A combination of simple bio-acoustic sensors and some sophisticated machine learning makes it possible for people to use their fingers or forearms -- potentially, any part of their bodies -- as touchpads to control smart phones or other mobile devices.

The technology, called Skinput, was developed by Chris Harrison, a third-year Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), along with Desney Tan and Dan Morris of Microsoft Research. Harrison will describe the technology in a paper to be presented on April 12, at CHI 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Ga.