This research aims to create a new way of comunication using and increasing our sense of touch by creating a wearable tool, which has an open use, but in this research will focus to give a critical answer to our major visual based society and the concept that we never touched anything.
The main areas where this new form of comunication can be used are:
1. helping vision disabled people, which could then could have another option to comunicate other than the braille language, since it is a form of comunication that is not open for an instant answer.
2. Movement disabled people, or long distant relation users which want to experience another type of connection that the visual devices cannot create.
3. People who want to experience and receive other types of information that couldn‘t been send by visual comunication devices.
The portability of personal computer had increased at a fast pace, and today there are available smartphones, tablets, and other devices which gathered in one tool different functions of comunication, with a increasead cabability of processing information.
Those devices play videos, music and do multitask actions better than the home computers of the previous decade, and they can fit into your pocket, your face, or your wrist.
The number of those portable comunication devices increased at the last years, due to the low price. In countries like Chine, U.S.A., or Russia, there are 93.2, 103.1, and 155.1 cellphones for each 100 habitants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use)
Also, the amount of data and the more diary use of those devices has increased with the use creation of the so called “social media”.
The somatosensory system is a complex sensory system. It is made up of a number of different receptors, including thermoreceptors,photoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors. It also comprises essential processing centres, or sensory modalities, such asproprioception, mechanoreception (touch), thermoception (temperature), and nociception (pain). The sensory receptors cover the skinand epithelial tissues, skeletal muscles, bones and joints, internal organs, and the cardiovascular system.
Although touch (also called tactile perception) is considered one of the five traditional senses, the impression of touch is formed from several modalities including pressure, skin stretch, vibration and temperature. In medicine, the colloquial term “touch” is usually replaced with “somatic senses” to better reflect the variety of mechanisms involved.
The system works when activity in a sensory neuron is triggered by a specific stimulus such as pain, for instance. This signal then passes to the part of the brain attributed to that area on the body—this allows the stimulus to be felt at the correct location.
Questions and possible answers given through the project:
1. Research our relation with the space by the touch, or our perception of the space by this sense. Where does the space begins?
Enhance our perception of touch by additional senses. Enhance our movements to touch objects and the chemical and biological processes that delivers this information to our mind.
The good sensation that a kind touch leaves in our body. Research the chemical and biological process for it.
2. Research more about the physical aspect and represent the fact that we never touched anything. What sensations are better to block? Maybe we need to avoid the self touch and enhance the contact with others.
3. Research about the political and sociological aspects of space and touch.
Zygmunt Bauman’s non-space in which we live today that are free from people. We are used to live in a world overpopulated, but we lost the capacity to interact in it. Deal with the huge amount of communication devices that we have today. Improve human contact. One of the objects should be beautiful and attractive to others. Somehow should gave pleasure to the user and to others.
The whole prototype of the electronic and coding part of the project was done with the open-source computer hardware and software Arduino.
Arduino is based on a family of microcontroller board designs manufactured primarily by SmartProjects in Italy, using various 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontrollers or 32-bit Atmel ARM processors. These systems provide sets of digital and analog I/O pins that can be interfaced to various expansion boards and other circuits. The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including USB on some models, for loading programs from personal computers. For programming the microcontrollers, the Arduino platform provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing project, which includes support for C and C++ programming languages.
After the eletronic prototype part it was used the software Fritzing, which is an open source software initiative to support designers and artists. It was developed at the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam.
The main advantage of the software is the easy interface to document and record the layout of the created breadboards.
After all the eletronic components were tested and improved at the protoboard, it was necessary to make a final shield for the Arduino in order to decrease the size of the circuit, made it user friendly, and more important, made it portable.
It was used the software CAD Soft EAGLE for creating the schematic and the board design. EAGLE (for: Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor, German: Einfach anzuwendender grafischer Layout-Editor) by CadSoft Computer is a flexible, expandable and scriptable EDA application with schematic capture editor, PCB layout editor, auto-router and CAM and BOM tools developed by CadSoft Computer GmbH, Germany, since 1988. EAGLE is popular among smaller design houses and in academia for its favourable licensing terms and rich availability of component libraries on the web.[citation needed] Hobbyists are attracted by the availability of freeware licenses.
After the board was designed with the most eficient use of the small space available, the CNC code was generated. Due to try and error process, a more fast speed configuration was used, making only five offset paths of cut in each line. The software used for this was the Fabmodules.
All the Arduinos, fabricated shields, sensors, motors and batteries working properly.
For fabricating the cases of the DC Motors, the Arduino‘s and the produced Shields, it was created a series of compartments using a 3D Printer. This option was choosed due to the geometry that would be created, and the possibility to change and inprove the final result easily.
The method of 3D Printing used was an aditive one, using PLA filaments.
The 3d Printer was the BCN3D+, an open hardware based on the mechanic of the RapRap Prussa, developed by the Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya and assembled by the author.
The file for the machine to print is know as G-Code. This file is a series of numbers that represent the position of the nozller and the speed that the extruder need to go to the current point from the previous point. this speed determines the size of the heated fillament. The G-Code was generated using the Slic3r software, a free software that generate the G-Code file, by configurations defined by the user, such as height of each layer, temperature, percentage of the fill of each solid, style of the fill, etc. The Slic3r software need as a basic input the base geometry to be 3d printed. This geometry was made using the Rhino software, but could be generated by any major 3dD modeler.
The project opened a broad range of possibilities for improvement.
The choose for a radio frequency board to send the data from one Arduino to the other had some advantages, a couple of backfires on the project happened. One of them was the delay of information that was intentionaly set from the time that the data is received from the arduino to the moment that it is translated to movent to the DC Motors vibrators. This delay needed to be long enough as one seconc to not over-fload the radio frequency receiver. Altough one second don‘t appear to be a long period, it jeopardize the sense of instant response of the device.
Another weak point of the choosen radio frequency components was that radio frequency devices are extremely suitable by noise polution caused by eletrostatic that are each day increasing in our society. The scenario get worst since the project is using so many eletric motors, which by definition generate a extremely big eletromagnetic field. The coil produced by the motors interfere a lot on the radio frequency receiver, being very frequent on this project to receive a “dirty data“. The sender part is not affected.
The main advantages for using the radio frequency boards was the simpler code that they demand other than the internet one. Also this option was choosen to create an acesible project to be reproduced later in the maker comunity, since it has been choosen a low cost radio frequency transmitters and receivers (each ranging fro 8€ to 12€). There are more stable already made shields, but their price range between 40€ to 50€, which would become hard to be freely reproduced.
The ideal way of comunication would be made the connection through internet, which would achieve the desired effect of creating a functional new way of comunication other than the cellphones and other common visual devices that are available today.
Other than this, one of the main points to emphasize is that altough this project aims to create a new way of comunication, it would never be the same of the existing way of comunications, which are based on the written language and speak language, because those forms of languages are based on different senses, as the vision and hearing sense.
The touch sense demand to develop a language in order to comunicate through the touch sense.
There would not be a substitute for a twitter send from a cellphone, or written message telling specific information. Other than this, the information sent could be of a specific feeling as love, or hate, or gratitude.
The point that could be develop from this project, but demand years of research are the areas that should be excited on the body in order to create this set of desired emotions. This would demand a better research on the phyical part of the motors and also a biological, medical and pysicological team.