I expected “gesture control” to be immediately intuitive. But as I slip on the MYO—a
flexible band that fits around my forearm—a cursor on a laptop in front
of me begins somersaulting wildly across the screen, tracking my
erratic arm movements. I focus, slow down and try to get a feel for this
new tool.
“Move your wrist right—and now left,” instructs Stephen Lake, co-founder of Thalmic Labs
of Waterloo, Ontario, the start-up behind the MYO (named after a
biological prefix denoting muscle). As I do, the engineering interface
on Lake’s computer screen registers a burst of raw data—peaks and dips
of scrolling electrical activity produced by my engaged skeletal
muscles. Then, the program flashes the words “right” and “left,”
confirming that it understood my actions. I’m beginning to get the hang
of this.
I’m in a New York City office, where Lake is offering the first
hands-on demonstration of the MYO, a new gesture control interface. The
armband has insulated electrodes that detect small volts of electricity
that muscles produce when they expand, contract or move in any
direction. The band transmits those data wirelessly to software, which
translates them into commands for a computer, drone or other electronic
device. The idea is to control these devices hands-free, and without the
need for cameras that would track my motions.
The MYO prototype resembles a clunky bracelet of the type Wilma Flintstone
might wear. The final product—the first batch ships out at the end of
the year—will resemble a sweatband, Lake says. The prototype is
fashioned out of 3-D–printed black plastic, embedded with several muscle
activity sensors. They act as electromyographs, or instruments that
detect minute electrical signals on the order of microvolts, produced by
activated muscles. “The challenge is picking up those tiny muscle activity signals and ignoring all the noise,” Lake says.
An inertial sensor, embedded in one of the MYO’s segments, registers
motion made with the arm, such as a rolling wave or a back-and-forth
swing. Using a large set of data, Lake and his co-founders applied
machine learning to train the MYO to recognize specific signals while
canceling out background noise. “What I am impressed with about the MYO
is the combination of state-of-the-art pattern recognition and machine
learning algorithms to detect gestures, with a strong base of acquiring
data,” says Daniel Stashuk,
an electrical engineer at the University of Waterloo who has no
financial ties to Thalmic Labs, in a phone interview. “Marrying those
two things together is quite useful.”
So far, the sensors can recognize around 20 gestures, from a sweeping
arm to a clenching fist. On the finest end of the spectrum, the MYO
responds to a thumb and finger pinching together. “It’s not that we
couldn’t detect smaller motions, but if we did, there would be so many
false positives,” Lake explains.
The MYO’s greatest limitation, Lake thinks, is the fact that the user
must wear it. If the armband is not wrapped around the forearm, it
cannot detect movement. Current challenges to improving the MYO’s
performance, he adds, include better defining an intuitive set of
gestures that could be applied across a wide variety of applications.
The team is also working to refine the MYO’s algorithms to improve
balance between sensitivity and false gesture detection.
Moving on with the demo, Lake opens up a computer game called
Counter-Strike, swooshing his arm up and down, left or right in order to
change perspective in the virtual world as well as flexing his thumb to
the top of his palm to shoot a gun. Lake says the MYO has broader
application than gaming, however. Although Lake has received inquiries
from companies specializing in gaming, music, toys, drones and more, he
has also been in touch with labs that are engaged in biosignal and
electromyography analysis, and some that work in prosthetics. He thinks
the MYO could find a place in serious games used to help rehabilitate
people who have suffered a loss of motor control by providing patients
with feedback as they progress in relearning certain movements.
The MYO could also assist partially paralyzed or impaired persons, so
long as they have a functioning forearm. “If they can complete gestures
or some set of gestures, then yes, this can be used to control their
environment,” Stashuk says. That could allow impaired individuals to
control light switches, turn on a television and command electronic beds
or wheelchairs.
In the office, after a bit of practice, I begin to get a grip on
gesture control, directing the cursor to hover over objects on Lake’s
screen or turning right or left in Counter-Strike’s dark halls. Although
I still can’t manage to get the virtual gun to fire, if Thalmic
realizes its vision, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice in the
future.
“As we move away from desktop computing, we’re really interested in
this idea of mobile, always available, wearable computing,” Lake says.
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