Project Presentation on "Touch"

Team Nuuanu Robotics Team:

Anchor 1 (ipad): Coby Chock

Anchor 2 (ipad): Lauren Arakaki

Anchor 3: Sean Sumida

Anchor 4: Jaren Pinera

Camera 1: Isaac Hokama

Camera 2: Mark Ushiroda

Dr. N: Kyra Yamauchi

Actor 1: Glove & Football Demonstrator: Anthony (AJ) Domingo

Dr. M: Kaisen Nakagawa

Actor 2: Glove & Fingernail Touch Sensors Demonstrator:

Jake Tsuchiyama

Back-up/Consultants/Assistants to set-up

Jared Davis

Lowen Fernandes

Steven Yamasaki

Jake Kubota

Rachel Yun

Caleb Bonilla

Tracy Lin

Justin Lau

Kawaiina Haiku

 

Anchor 1:  Good Morning ladies & gentlemen.  We are the students of Nuuanu Elementary School.  I am a news anchor and my name is: Colby

 

Anchor 2:  I am anchor Lauren.  As we set up our 21st century television studio to match the theme of Biomedical Engineering, let me introduce our team.

 

Anchor 3: I am anchor Sean. We also have our Doctors, and we have the actors.

 

Anchor 4:  I am anchor Jaren and we have brought in special equipment to assist us with the news broadcast.  We see them used in the community, schools and around the world. 

 

Anchor 1: In order to use these devices, we must make use of our body and senses.  Welcome to NTV - Nuuanu Television.  What is biomedical engineering?

 

Anchor 2: Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles and techniques to the medical field.

 

Anchor 1: This field seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine.

What body part did we choose? We decided to look at the senses.

The problem we chose was to recreate the feeling of touch.

 

Anchor 2: How do you recreate this feeling? With touch sensors. The sense of touch is one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome with prosthetic limbs.

 

Anchor 1: "E-skin" with pressure sensitivity could help amputees perform simple tasks, such as holding a glass without breaking it.  A critical problem with these force sensors is that they are often bulky and inevitably deteriorate.

 

Anchor 2: We will look at research focusing on reducing this problem by inventing thinner and more flexible force-sensing pads

Our entire new broadcast studio is touch sensor technology.

 

Anchor 1: The nerve endings in your skin can tell you if something is hot (show fire) or cold (show ice). They can also feel if something is hurting you (show a needle). Your body has about twenty different types of nerve endings that all send messages to your brain.

 

Anchor 2: Today, we focus on touch and pressure. We read and control our script from the ipad, which is a touch pad. Our news camera is a touch camera. (Camera 1 & 2 shows the touch camera )

 

Anchor 1: Multi-touch, popularized by Apple's iPhone, has become an important way for consumers to go beyond the keyboard and interact with their devices.

 

Anchor 3: (Show the ipad)

Touchscreens are set to go beyond just the two-finger scroll and  has the ability to distinguish up to ten simultaneous finger touches.

 

Anchor 4: Let's interview Dr. N - a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She and her students are equipping gloves and a football with remote sensing technology to measure everything from grip and trajectory to speed and position.

(Hold gloves with a football)

 

Dr. N: This technology would ultimately be able to tell without doubt whether the ball was caught before it bounced off the ground.

 

Anchor 4: Dr. N teaches various touch sensors, GPS receivers and accelerometers that the students are putting to use.

 

Anchor 1: Now for an interview with Dr. M from the University of Utah.

His doctoral thesis research project was the development of "Fingernail Touch Sensors" for human-machine interaction.

 

Dr. M:

These sensors can detect touch forces at the human fingertip as well as changes in finger posture by measuring the color pattern of the fingernail. Thus they do not interfere with the human's natural sense of touch.

 

Miniaturized optical sensors placed on the fingernail measure the blood in the fingertip,

 

Actor 2:

Jake Tsuchiyama

This research aims to develop models of the fingertip and fingernail sensor system that can predict the state of the fingers based on the sensor signals.

 

Anchor 3: Thank you Dr. M and Jake.

 A wide variety of such pads have been developed in the past for applications in robotics and medicine, using resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, or optical elements to detect force.

 

Anchor 4: A critical problem with these force sensors is that they are often bulky. Recently, much research has focused on reducing this problem by inventing thinner and more flexible force-sensing pads

 

 Camera 1: Touch sensor for detecting contact pressure at human fingertips

 

Actor 2 (Jake) : Fingernail is instrumented with miniature LEDs and photodetectors in order to measure changes in the nail color when the fingertip is pressed against a surface.

 

Actor 1: Measure the pattern of nail color, i.e., the blood content under the fingernail.

 

Dr. M Unlike traditional electronic gloves, in which sensor pads are placed between the fingers and the environment surface, this new sensor allows the fingers to directly contact the environment without obstructing the human's natural haptic senses.

 

Anchor 1: This was a special report from NTV. Thank you for watching!