Skip to main content

Ingenious accelerometer hack could allow existing smartwatches to identify any object that you grab

Like the awkward teenagers of tech, smartwatches are still finding their way in the world. They have a whole lot of untapped promise, but in a lot of ways, are still working out how to best live up to their potential. There are even moments of first love and door-slamming frustration thrown in for good measure.

“Right now, smartwatches are mostly glorified fitness trackers with a touch screen,” Chris Harrison, assistant professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, told Digital Trends. “I don’t think we’ve real seen the true emergence of what a smartwatch can be. Smartphones opened up whole new domains for us, like Uber and Yelp and various other apps, which we didn’t have before. Smartwatches haven’t had that moment yet. Right now, they’re still glorified digital watches.”

“It’s recasting the role of the smartwatch.

Harrison’s not trolling the efforts of smartwatch companies, though. Working with a team of other researchers from the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, his lab has been busy exploring how wearable devices can better live up to the “next big thing” label they’ve been assigned.

And you know what? After years of hard work, they may have just cracked it!

The solution they have come up with is a project called ViBand, which repurposes the built-in accelerometer found in smartwatches and uses it to detect various gestures made by the user. Oh, and you don’t have to touch the screen for it to work, either.This is achieved through the use of a custom smartwatch kernel that boosts the accelerometer’s sampling rate up from 100 Hertz to 4 kilohertz (a 4000 percent increase). Doing so allows the accelerometers to detect tiny vibrations that travel through the wearer’s arm, which opens up a massive range of potential applications.

“Your hand is the chief way that you manipulate the world around you,” Professor Harrison continued. “You shake hands with people, type on keyboards, put coffee in your mouth, touch objects, and much more. We wanted to know if we could take all of this and use it to augment the user experience by capturing unique information about the hand. It’s recasting the role of the smartwatch.”

Given that smartwatch screens are never going to be large enough for complex hand-based input, it’s a clever concept because it ditches an insubstantial input (the tiny smartwatch screen) for one that’s got a whole lot more surface area — namely the human body.

“This has enormous possibilities in simplifying people’s lives.”

“We didn’t just want to do hand gestures, but also to put a virtual button on the skin,” Harrison said. “For example, if you tap your elbow it should be possible for that to trigger a certain type of functionality.”

This all well and good, but the really impressive part of ViBand is still to come. That’s the fact that it doesn’t just recognize what the hand is doing in isolation, but can also work out when a user is touching a particular object and trigger an action accordingly.

“This has enormous possibilities in simplifying people’s lives,” Harrison said. “Right now, if you have a smart home and you want to modify the color or brightness of a Philips Hue light, for example, you have to pull out your phone, go into the app, and change the settings there. If a smartwatch knows what you touch, on the other hand, you can have a scenario where just touching a light switch will open up the correct app. It’s all about context sensing, and it’s a magic user experience that only a smartwatch can really pull off. It can always be two steps ahead of you.”

c_object_set
Image used with permission by copyright holder

At present, the ViBand project is still described as an “exploratory research project,” meaning that your best shot of using it is to enroll as a computer science major at Carnegie Mellon. However, since every great user interface starts out as a piece of R&D, there’s nothing to say this isn’t how all smartwatches will work one day.

There has certainly been plenty of interest in the project. When it was presented at last week’s Association for Computing Machinery’s User Interface Software and Technology (ACM UIST) Symposium in Tokyo, it won a well-deserved “Best Paper” award. From here, it’s just about getting the tech giants to see the light — or, rather, the smart gestures.

Hey, if all smartwatches end up working like this, remember that you read about it at Digital Trends first!

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more