Getting all touchy feely and being preparedGetting all touchy feely and being prepared
Marc S. Reisch · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2018
Good vibrations Someday in the near future, when the Newscripts gang goes jogging and the phones strapped to our forearms start to buzz, they may be sending us messages we won’t even have to look at a screen to read. When that happens, it will all have been possible because of a Purdue University professor who developed a method to make speech a kind of tongue-lashing with good intentions. Hong Z. Tan, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Purdue, says folks at the social networking site Facebook wanted to know if it was possible to transmit written messages through the skin. Tan, an expert in human-machine interfaces, has long explored the touchy-feely side of digital communications, so she happily took on the challenge with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Facebook. “We thought it might be possible, and we could give it a try,” she says. Tan and