MouthPad: A Tongue-Controlled Touchpad
augmental.techAs someone who uses head, eye and facial gesture tracking regularly while doing long medical treatments which tie up both my hands, I would really love something like this.
I never even thought of that use case! What kind of stuff do you do on a computer while doing procedures? Like reference material? Tracking what you’ve done?
A lot less cool than you’d imagine, but hey this is real life. The computer my comfort place, so it’s there to keep my mind occupied and distracted from the treatment’s (iontophoresis) pain. A lot of feel-good scrolling, browsing HN, Reddit, my inbox, multitasking YouTube, etc. If I’m feeling particularly motivated I’ll use STT in my IDE and get some planning done.
As much as I'd like to support this, $1400 places it squarely in the "disability tax" bracket that accompanies products targeting this market.
Big tech will harvest your mewing data now
This seems really clever. I don't know anything about what it takes to serve the targeted needs, so I could be wrong. But it's the sort of thing that pops out as really cool and useful, tech that makes the world better.
Surgery robots have a tongue controller. It takes a while to train on that, but when you‘re trained your tongue muscle is the most precise way to control, say, subtle incisions deep inside the brain.
Do you have a link to those? It seems ... somewhat implausible.
A doctor told me that a few years ago, but googling it myself now, I don‘t find anything, either. I think I missed a joke back then.
Flag my comment, it‘s wrong.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11118463/
If anybody reading this wants to hire someone to devote their life to this tech, hit me up. Autistic special interest.
That’s cool but also definitely not the same thing that GP claimed.
If it can be made comfortable and cheap enough, this could be useful as an interface for AR glasses. The tongue is very sensitive and dextrous, and I imagine that even swipe typing with this kind of touchpad is probably feasible.
This looks great for accessibility specifically. My fiancee is partially-sighted, so (while not directly related) I'm extremely supportive of developments in assistive tech. There's a lot of difference to people's lives that can be made.
For me personally - maybe because I'm not a very nice person, or maybe it's an association that many people would make - clever as the pun in the product name is, it does make me think of saying "mousepad" with a lisp. This seems like a non-ideal association.
I vote we rename it to "Ling", short for "lingual"!
So refreshing to see such and interesting innovation in the hardware space! Curious as to what’s the business play here, as at $1400 a piece these don’t seem like mass-market devices. And the high-end market is even more constrained with the size of the subpopulation it is aimed at. Regardless of the business model, fingers crossed that more great assistive tech like this one ships!
It's a relatively low volume, customised product, likely with high development costs (even if it doesn't fall under medical device regulations, making something battery- powered that you stick in your mouth is gonna need a good safety case). It's also very valuable to those who use it, so the market can support the high price needed to cover development (the per unit costs are likely much smaller: note you can buy two for nearly the same price as one).
Because there is no mass market, relatively speaking.
This is a very novel UX and assistive tech, and I know more users globally (and in India for me) would find this useful.
Wonder if tongue would get tired from it or not an issue.
At first yes but just like any muscle it would adapt and probably quickly.
One of the strongest muscles in the body, too. Along with your jaw and uterus.
I can see exam candidates having mouth inspections in the future.
Love the name.
Step aside Codex Micro!
it's magic!
chocolate flavored touchpad please
Haven’t these existed before for military purposes?
I remember reading about tongue based sonar for divers, where the output of the sonar would stimulate electrodes on various parts of the tongue to indicate relative direction.