Future touchscreens could be a portable lab

They say that our fingers and hands are one of the dirtiest parts of our bodies, after all, who knows how many doorknobs, handles and buttons that you have come into contact with today, and multiply it with the thousands and millions of people who have done the same as you? Having said that, with touchscreen devices being so common, such bacteria and other nasties too, don’t mind residing on your glossy screen – and this is where researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) worked on an interesting low-cost concept that is capable of performing microscopic analyses thanks to a smartphone’s touchscreen display.

Taking into account the advantage of the capacitive touchscreen, through applying a bio-sample like blood, saliva, and even urine from a LOC cartridge to the screen, this group of researchers fully intend to see the smartphone’s screen register specific changes in its capacitance, which will be an indication of what the sample contains. This would mean the phone will be able to perform the analysis and send a report of the results almost instantaneously. Still in the proof-of-concept stage, it might just make touchscreen phones a compulsory purchase for all budding pathologists should it materialize in the real world, don’t you think so?

New touchscreen tech recognizes different parts of the finger

Small touchscreen devices such smartphones certainly have their attractions, but they also have one drawback - there isn't much room on their little screens for touch-sensitive features. This means that users will sometimes instead have to go into sub-menus, or make do with jabbing their fingers at tiny controls. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, however, are working on an alternative. Their prototype TapSense system can differentiate between screen taps from different parts of the finger, and will perform different tasks accordingly.

TapSense works by analyzing the sound of objects hitting the glass of the touchscreen display. Using an inexpensive microphone attached to the device (the built-in mics don't work), the system can tell the difference between taps delivered by a finger's pad, nail, knuckle, or tip. It can also differentiate between taps from styluses made out of different types of inert materials, such as wood, acrylic and polystyrene foam.

An app running on a smartphone or other touchscreen device, equipped with TapSense, could perform different functions based on what part of the finger its operator used. This means that users could stay on one screen that had fairly large controls, changing modes or accessing features by alternating between various types of taps - not unlike using a right mouse button.

The researchers demonstrated one possible application of the technology, in which a knuckle tap on an email heading brought up a list of options, instead of opening the message. In another example, a paint app allowed users to draw freehand when using the pad of their finger, but inserted straight lines when they used their tip. In yet another, users could access alternate characters on a virtual keyboard app by typing with the tip of their finger (as opposed to the pad), and backspace by nail-tapping.

Because TapSense can tell the difference between styluses made from different materials, this means that multiple people could use the screen simultaneously and the device would be able to identify which user was which, based on what the point of their stylus was made of. Different functions could also be assigned to different materials, making possible a stylus with a "pen" on one end and an "eraser" on the other.