You can send a hug over the internet with this haptic invention

Mata Amritanandamayi, a 69-year-old Indian spirit The leader known simply as Amma, or “mother”, is a global icon who is also known as the hug saint.

Born in a fishing village in the state of Kerala to a humble background, she was so deeply affected by the plight of her poorer neighbors that she became a regular provider of food and clothing. for them.

Also: Are VR headsets safe for kids and teens? Here’s what the experts say

Today, according to the New York Times, she charity organization covers everything from disaster relief and free healthcare for the poor to free meals, orphanages, and recycling initiatives. Many of these charity organization located in the United States.

However, her signature event is one where she sits in a large auditorium, at home, in India or in one of thousands of auditoriums around the world and hugs people non-stop for ten years. five o’clock.

Human contact

At first, Amma’s mass hugging seemed like a farce.

However, since the coronavirus pandemic, if there’s one thing we humans all feel and can agree on, it’s loneliness — or lack of human contact — is wreaking havoc on our species. And within that truth is our craving for touch.

The virus has robbed us of, perhaps, the most important human social behavior. We’ve gone from handshakes at work and hugs with friends and family to lockdowns and strict no-contact rules.

This pandemic-induced deprivation even gave birth to the term I’m hungry to try to include rising rates of depression and anxiety after the pandemic.

Also: Work together or go back to the office, here’s how to keep everyone engaged

More evidence suggests that psychological conditions are often triggered by physical factors, experiment demonstrated that a brain scan of a stressed person induces tranquility in them when they are held hands, and even when it is by a stranger.

For babies, touch is a survival tool, since held on a sudden regulations heart rate and breathing rate, and its absence has been known to cause distress.

All these meanings make sense when we consider complex neural networks yarns Our skin has evolved to detect and respond to other people’s touch.

Touch allows to activate three Hormonal health booster — oxytocin, also known as the ‘love hormone’; serotonin, which regulates mood; and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that induces pleasure.

Then what if we took Amma’s philosophy of gentle touch and carried it over the internet?

Also: US Surgeon General announces social media health advisory

What if you could hug your loved one for that much-needed comfort in times of joy as well as trouble, and feel the comforting lines on their backs and hands? , even though they’re thousands of miles away?

Now, a team of scientists from the City University of Hong Kong has come up with a electronic skin the magic that allows you to do just that, pushing the limits of tactile science and creating new possibilities for solutions in the field augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (Virtual reality).

touch the wire

haptic feedback is a popular and rapidly growing technology that allows humans to “feel” things, such as the vibration of a game controller in your hand.

Merged with AR and VR worlds, technologists envision being able to do things like training operated doctor or a jet engine technician through 3D imaging and a glove can provide complex feedback. Location suddenly becomes irrelevant.

Also: I tried the Apple Vision Pro and it went beyond what I expected

However, the problem so far has been that it has been impossible to provide touch and tactile feedback or reproduce it simultaneously.

Now, scientists in Hong Kong have been able to do both at the same time — receive the physical sensation of a handshake (haptic feedback) and send a wireless, contactless sensor that others can perceive on the other side of the connection.

What’s more, you can connect an entire network so that thousands of people can experience a sensation that scientists call a touch-sensitive communication system.

How it works

On a 4.2 mm thick skin-like patch, there is a flexible electronic circuit board containing a 4×4 array of sensors called actuators, along with a microcontroller and a Bluetooth module.

These actuators, each about the size of a dime, are made up of a flexible coil, a soft silicone holder, and they act like buttons.

When the user presses and releases the actuator button, an electric current is generated through the principle of electromagnetic induction and then converted into a digital signal by an analog-to-digital converter on the circuit board. of e-skins.

This signal is sent via Bluetooth, over the internet to another electronic skin similarly equipped with the same actuator.

At the receiving end, the reverse happens — the analog digital signal is converted to an analog signal for haptic feedback. The longer the actuator button is pressed, the longer and stronger the feeling or vibration on the receiving side.

Also: The best Bluetooth tracker you can buy

Equipped with 15 actuators, these electronic skins can perform bio-directed induction conduction simultaneously.

“Our electronic skin can communicate with Bluetooth devices and transmit data over the internet using smartphones and computers to realize super-long distance touch transmission and to form an Internet of Things system. touch objects (IoT), where one-to-one and one-to-one multi-touch delivery can be realized,” speak lead scientist, Associate Professor Yu Xinge, in an article published in the journal Science Advances.

“Friends and family in different places can use it to ‘feel’ each other… This form of contact overcomes spatial limitations and greatly reduces the sense of distance in communication. human continuity,” he added.

Cognitive psychologist Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Interaction Lab, is a big fan. “What we’ve shown in our studies is that this virtual contact is well received. You can actually draw emotions from it,” he says. speak. He told CNN: “People are able to understand very accurately, more than twice as much as predictably, other people’s emotions through this virtual reality exposure.

“And what my research has shown is that from a cognitive-psychological perspective, people perceive virtual touch the way they do physical touch when it comes to emotional gestures,” he added.

Also: Can AI step up to provide help when humans can’t?

In addition to nurturing tactile emotions, technology has Key implications for telemedicinewhere doctors can perform physical examinations and for the visually impaired, who can benefit from touch-based instruction through electronic skin and also the ability to send messages in braille.

This technology can become indispensable in video game design, entertainment, and countless other applications that use touch and remote feedback. And just imagine what the embracing saint could do with it.