Microsoft and MIT Researchers designed wearable “smart” tattoo control your smartphone

How cool does it sound when you can operate your Android device with a smart tattoo, amazing no? Researchers from Microsoft and MIT Media Lab have collaborated together to bring a temporary wearable tattoo. This wearable “Smart” tattoo can control your smart phone, moreover it also can share the data with the help of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology. Researchers also said that one can design their own circuit with the help of graphic software and has named this technology as “Duoskin”.

Duoskin can be turned into three things:

• Like a touchpad
• Can control your smart phone
• Last but not the least can transfer the data using NFC

How does it work?

This smart tattoo can be stamped into a golden leaf like figure and it will be conductive in nature. To make this tattoo interactive one can then incorporate other components and commodity material. This tattoo is deisgned such that one can use it as a trackpad, can be designed in such a way that it changes color with the change in temperature, or even data can be pulled from this tattoo.

How to apply it?

It can be simply applied just like some normal temporary tattoo and then put a damp cloth on it, peel of the tattoo paper and you are good to go.

Something like this has been tried before:

MIT also shared a picture in which it is seen that this tattoo can be used to glow LEDs, in the picture one can see researchers using LED lights to create something like glowing display on your skin. This is not the first time when researchers have tried something like this. Back in 2010 Carnegie Mellon student amalgamated with Microsoft researchers to develop a technology named “skinput” that could turn you wrist or back of the hand into a “gestural finger input canvas”.

But that technology turned out to be quite expensive and one also required a device that could project the interface onto the skin.

If one is interested in buying this tattoo then they have to wait for its announcement till the next month. One can find the information about this tattoo on MIT’s website and it will be presented in an event named “Symposium “, next month itself.

These are nothing but “Smart patches” on which all the health and consumer product good companies are experimenting. Looking at such experiments, we feel that our is going to be much more easy and hassle free.