New Wearable Tech Simulates Realistic Touch

The device lets you feel touch on your skin, like pressure or movement. It could help with games, shopping, health, and more.

Most haptic devices today can only make simple vibrations, but our skin can feel many things like pressure, stretching, and movement. Engineers at Northwestern University have made a small, light device that sticks to the skin and can copy these different feelings. It can move in any direction to create touches like sliding, twisting, or pressing. The strength and speed of the touch can also change to feel more real.

The device uses a small battery and connects to phones or VR headsets with Bluetooth. It’s small enough to wear anywhere on the body or combine with other devices. The team hopes it can improve virtual reality, help people who are blind or deaf, make online shopping feel more real, and even help with remote doctor visits.

Touch is hard to copy because it’s very complex. Our skin has many sensors that feel pressure, stretching, and vibration. These sensors send signals to the brain to create the feeling of touch. To match this, a device needs to control what kind of touch it gives, how strong it is, and when it happens — something current tech still struggles to do.

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Actuator unleashed

To copy the full feeling of touch, the Northwestern team made a tiny part called an actuator that can move in any direction. This is different from older actuators that can only move one or two ways. Because it can move freely, it can create more real and detailed touch feelings on the skin.

The actuator is very small and uses a magnet and coils of wire. When electricity goes through the coils, it makes the magnet move by pushing, pulling, sliding, or twisting. Many of these actuators can be used together to create feelings like pinching, stretching, squeezing, or tapping.

Bringing the virtual world to life

The team added a small sensor called an accelerometer to the device to track how it moves and which way it’s facing. This helps the device give the right kind of touch based on how the user is moving. The device can also send information through the skin using different vibration patterns. The team turned sounds like music into touch signals by changing the strength, speed, and direction of the vibrations. This lets users feel the difference between musical instruments through touch alone.