Myo Gestures: A Technology Interface for the Future

Thalmic Lab’s Myo armband has the potential to revolutionize technology interfaces. Recently, I was in my kitchen finishing my vinaigrette, and wanted to resume a step-by-step video. But my tablet did not register my touch because my hands were encased in gloves. If I had been wearing the Myo, I could have waved my arm, and the video would have resumed. The Myo armband is a wearable device that uses EMG sensors to measure electrical activity in muscles. By wearing the band snugly around the lower forearm, the device can detect motions such as fists, finger tapping, and waving in addition to collecting data like acceleration, orientation, and rotation. Initially, our technology interfaces were limited to the keyboard and mouse. In the 2000’s, we saw the advent of touch interfaces with smartphones and tablets. Now, Myo could pioneer the next step in this evolution: gesture control.

From Touch to Gestures

I love that Myo’s goal is to remove proximity and touch as a barrier to technology. Users will give presentations, control drones, and play videogames in a more natural interface. I have given presentations by tapping my fingers: an interface I found more natural and enjoyable than a mouse and keyboard interface. Without loosing the thread of a conversation, I could easily control the slide deck. The Myo differentiates itself from similar devices by understanding a user’s muscles rather than tracking movements through an external sensor. A Kinect is able to recognize the same gestures a Myo can[i], but a user is confined to its sensor space. A Myo application, however, is only limited by Bluetooth’s more-than-sufficient 100-meter range. Currently, the Myo can only be worn on the arm. Long term, however, Thalmic could apply their core competency in muscle tracking to other body parts. For instance, a user could open a door by sliding a foot across the ground.

Wearable Sports Coach

The Myo device intrigued me when my Stanford CS210 team utilized its gyroscope data to track a user’s golf swing. The intuition was that each person’s golf swing is unique, and an application that tracked a user’s swing path could “learn” his or her unique swing. After learning a user’s swing, the application could instruct a user how to make his or her swing more consistent: something all golfers work towards. The Myo could tell if a user was swinging too fast, the backswing was too short, or the angle of impact was off. As a golfer and all-around active person, I am excited how wearables could replace human coaches, allowing me to improve my game quickly and easily. Even more exciting is that a sports coach is only one of a myriad of applications possible for the Myo.

Design Challenges

Although Thalmic halved the thickness of their Alpha unit to the currently available unit[ii], wearing the Myo is not effortless. Users must roll up sleeves, and experience muscle fatigue from extended usage[iii]. The Myo slips easily, necessitating recalibration. Multiple barriers to an effortless interface will make the Myo a short-lived gimmick rather than a long-term value-adding technology. A potential future product design improvement could be a transparent or skin-colored adhesive like a Band-Aid. This improved design would fit under clothing, not weigh down the user’s arm, not slip, but would still provide access to EMG data. Thalmic could also develop an adhesive that does not hurt to remove, like some available bandages[iv]. But, these design objectives will be difficult to reconcile. A more subtle design will align Myo with the trend towards invisible wearables[v].

Conclusion

Myo has the opportunity to serve as the hub through which users communicate with the increasingly interconnected environment. Leap Motion, Magic Leap, and Google’s Project Soli are also rethinking the way we interact with our environment, while other new technologies like Apple’s Force Touch and Touch ID continue to expand upon the touch interface. On the other hand, products like Siri and Google Now propose voice interface as a viable replacement for touch interface, competing with the rise of gesture interface. Like many revolutionary technologies, Myo’s challenge lies in convincing users to forsake the old (touch interfaces) and embrace the new (gesture control). Combined with smart home technology, we can imagine a future in which a user needs only snap his fingers to turn on a TV. If devices move away from touch to gesture interfaces, the design of ordinary products could change drastically. Designers no longer would need to assume finger use and could instead focus on other characteristics like visibility, durability, aesthetics, and size. Myo is a wearable that has the potential to be not just a passive monitoring system, but rather an interface by which we communicate with a technologically connected world.

[i] Zhou Ren, Jingjing Meng, Junsong Yuan, and Zhengyou Zhang. 2011. Robust hand gesture recognition with kinect sensor. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Multimedia (MM ‘11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 759–760. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2072298.2072443

[ii] “The Evolution of the Myo Armband.” The Blog. Thalmic Labs, 27 July 2014. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.

[iii] Vanishing, “Muscle Fatigue?”. 19 Oct. 2015. Thalmic Labs Developer Forum. 26 Oct. 2015. https://developer.thalmic.com/forums/topic/1875/?page=1#post-7901

[iv] Neporent, Liz. “New High-Tech Bandage Takes Insult Out of Injury.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 1 Nov. 2012. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.

[v] Davies, Stephen. “Wearables Predicted To Become Invisibles by 2017.” Bionicly. 12 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.