Headphones let you control your mobile with facial expressions

[OyaYansa]

Denys Matthies, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, has developed headphones that allow you to control your mobile phone with facial expressions.

At present, the engineers are designing all kinds of solutions that allow us to use the smartphone without touching it. The most po[CENSORED]r are control systems by hand or voice gestures or, but they are not the only alternatives, as Matthies has been able to demonstrate with its new prototype.

The ears can provide information of our facial expressions. When we move the face there are changes in the electric field and the tissues undergo a temporal deformation. These data can be detected by an electrode housed inside the ear, so that the gestures we make with the face and the movements of the head can be used to control electronic devices.

Thus, by integrating these electrodes into a headset, the user can trigger different actions on his mobile phone without having to touch him through facial expressions, for example to go from song to answer a call. "We're not trying to replace traditional input methods, but we're creating an add-on for them," explains Matthies in New Scientist.

The operation of the prototype of this researcher and his team is very simple. For example, if the user smiles, his electric field and the muscles of his ears are positioned in a certain way that the electrode is able to identify. The device then sends the instruction associated with this gesture to the smartphone, for example taking a picture.