Our mobile app catches events on your phone and the xBand forwards them as vibration patterns to your wrist. You will quickly learn to interpret them. Leaving your ears, eyes, hands and attention to more important tasks.
With xBand you can quickly learn to feel not only that you get a call or text message but who was calling/texting and with practice even the content of a message.
The vibration patterns could have any encoding but we found that Morse code is a perfect combination of simple/easy to learn and speed/efficiency. Our app has a training module that will get you up and running in no time!
A text message could look like this: "M P LUNCH?". M for text Message, P is my shortcode for Peter and he is asking if I am ready for lunch.
You can also use the buttons on xBand to send commands in Morse code to your phone. For example to send a text message, request the current time or set an alarm.
The future
The vision for this product is to be an unnoticeable interface between the users. We want our users to experience communication without thinking about the technology that supports it.
We think that the sense of touch can provide that experience, but buttons are certainly not enough. Therefore, we are working on a new input solution. By measuring the voltage differences on the wrist, we can detect the nervous systems electrical stimuli of muscles controlling the fingers and thereby read finger movements. In the diagram below you can see the word "mother" in Morse code and a comparison between the force produced by our vibration motors and the signal measured from index finger movements. Machine learning is then used to interpret these signals into Morse code and perfectly understandable text or commands.
