Now Control Your Smart Phone by Stroking Your Hair

It is not unusual to learn about women getting held up in threatening situations in everyday news where they could not reach emergency help. Getting entangled into tough situations may even make more difficult for a person to get help. But what if someone can just do a natural gesture and trigger an application on the smart phone without alerting anybody nearby?

Hairware and researcher Katia Vega from pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro have designed a hair extension with safety in mind for women. The hair extension comes with a capacitive wire to act as a remote touch sensor that may interact with the smart phone app. The hairclip has Bluetooth module and a microcontroller that allows the hair to communicate with the user’s module.

The researcher Katia Vega said that the functionalities have been added to hair extensions and it works with auto contact behaviors that are kept discreet from the observation of outsiders. This hair extension acts as a touch sensor that is capable of detecting touch variations on the hair and uses algorithms to recognize the user’s intentions.

This implies that different types of touch will communicate differently to the application and one touch may be enough to open the app and the second type of touch or specific type of stroke to the extension will activate the apps function to send a message to a friend or family member or even it can take photographs.