Different Tapping

Backed by $2.3 million, the San Jose, California-based startup has developed a new touchscreen technology that can detect the difference between a fingertip, a knuckle, a fingernail, and a stylus. By assigning different parts of the finger to different actions, this technology–known as FingerSense–could reduce tasks that currently require multiple steps to just one. We still use a single input–a fingertip–to operate the device. And that limits the way we use our phones. On a desktop, there’s a mouse, a right click button, a shift button, and many other inputs that serve different functions. But on the smartphone, because there’s just the fingertip, a common task like copying and pasting becomes a tedious process of tapping, holding, dragging, and selecting. Qeexo wants to finally put the smartphone on par with the desktop. The technology uses the accelerometer to detect the different vibrations created by the different parts of the hand. One of the other uses for this type of technology would come from the development of it on the body. A challenge of it is that the sensors have to specific enough to recognize the taps and it has to become intuitive and helpful in solving a problem. Otherwise, people will not adopt this new software development.