This Special Stylus Lets You Use A Smartwatch From The Back Of Your Hand

Dhir Acharya - May 20, 2020

Smartwatches are convenient but their tiny screens make things difficult sometimes. So, researchers have created a special stylus to solve this problem.

Smartwatches are useful because they allow people to access information quickly through a screen on their wrist. However, the challenge is the small screen, which makes it hard to navigate with our big fingers. There’s now a solution to that, thanks to researchers from Leibniz University Hannover. They created a special stylus that takes advantage of the back of the wearer’s hand, turning it into a doodling area.

smartwatch stylus — A special stylus that allows you to use the back of your hand as a screen

Housing cellular connections, smartwatches are getting closer to replacing an actual smartphone, meaning we will likely leave larger devices at home. However, some simple tasks become more difficult when performing on the tiny screen of the smartwatch, like texting. You can rely on voice recognition, but it doesn’t always work. Handwriting kicks in too, but it would take too much time as you have to draw letter by letter.

To solve this problem once and for all, in their attempt, the researchers have developed a custom stylus for the smartwatch that users can use to scribble over the back of their hand as a way to extend the screen of the smartwatch. This stylus is almost as small as a typical ballpoint pen, mounted with a bulge near its tip to accommodate a magnet. There’s also a rechargeable battery that lasts for 12 hours.

The special stylus (middle) is as small as a regular ballpoint pen

The stylus is connected with the smartwatch via Bluetooth while the watch has to track the position and movement of the stylus. The smartwatch must have a built-in magnetometer for tracking the stylus’ motions based on the magnetic field’s intensity.

The stylus comes with additional electronics to keep track of the pen’s orientation as well as its angle while the tip detects when it’s making contact with the wearer’s skin and taps from their finger to facilitate shortcuts to change tools quickly, or navigates the watch’s UI when the stylus isn’t drawing. This approach is clever because instead of reprogramming the stylus for drawing in mid-air, the researchers limit its use on the back of the hand only so users can better control the stylus based on the on-screen cursor.

The researchers can move on and make the stylus write the entire word on the hand and show up on the screen.