Interview with the creators of DuoSkin #WearableWednesday

from Interview with the creators of DuoSkin #WearableWednesday
by Jessica

The News Lens has a interview with the creators of Duoskin, a temporary tattoo-like wearable device.

We all went through the temporary tattoo phase at some point as a child; whether it was hearts, dinosaurs, cars or a random prize out of the cereal box. Just when we thought we were past the age, metallic temporary tattoos took the market by storm with their polished glamor. Beyoncé even teamed up with a temporary tattoo brand in 2015 to launch her own line of metallic body art.

But did you ever imagine controlling your mobile device or storing information with an inexpensive self-customized temporary tat? This is what DuoSkin offers.

DuoSkin allows users to create three types of user interfaces via the temporary wearable tattoos: input on skin through capacitive touch sensing; output on skin through thermochromic resistive heating circuitry; and, wireless communication via near-field communication (NFC). That means you could adjust the volume on your smartphone, just by touching one of these temporary tattoos.

“If you look at wearables today, they are usually black plastic wristbands designed by people in Silicon Valley,” says Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao (高新綠), developer and researcher at DuoSkin. “They don’t speak to me, which is why, though I’m a wearable technology researcher, I never wear wearables. It just does not go with my personal aesthetics or my identity.”

The new body art technology was created by MIT Media Lab, where Kao is a fourth-year doctorate student, in partnership with Microsoft Research. It was awarded the 2017 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards in March, the same award Twitter and Airbnb won respectively in 2007 and 2011.

Read more.

---

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!