Wearable Device, NailO turns your thumbnail into a Tiny Trackpad

A team of MIT researchers, Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao and Artem Dementyev are developing a tiny trackpad that fits over your thumbnail. They are calling it NailO. Inspired by decorative nail stickers, NailO involves multilayered miniaturized hardware that wirelessly transmits data via Bluetooth to a mobile device or PC.

NailO can be used in situations where both of your hands are occupied. With NailO, you can draw on it with your other fingers, swipe in any direction, and even type with it on a cellphone. This little touchpad is great for use when cooking, walking or doing hand-intensive work.

"It's very unobtrusive," Kao explains. "When i put this on, it becomes part of my body. I have the power to take it off, so it stills gives you control over it. But it allows this very close connection to your body."

To build their prototype, the researchers needed to find a way to pack capacitive sensors, a battery, and three separate chips - a microcontroller, a Bluetooth radio chip and a capacitive-sensing chip - into a space no larger than a thumbnail. "The hardest part was probably the antenna design," says Artem Dementyev. "You've to put the antenna far enough away from the chips so that it doesn't interfere with them".

For their initial prototype, the researchers built their sensors by printing copper electrodes on sheets of flexible polyester. A paper describing a prototype of the device is schedules to be presented at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Seoul, South Korea this week.