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Can touch this
Gadget uses human body to network electronic business cards, smart devices
_Published: Oct. 21, 1996_
BY JANET RAE-DUPREE
Mercury News Staff Writer
Everything a business person needs to know about IBM researcher Tom
Zimmerman is just a touch away.
Zimmerman has created a ''personal area network,'' an electronic gizmo
that could bring a whole new meaning to the power of the handshake.
The prototype system allows users to exchange business card
information, or just about any other data, simply by touching one
another.
If you've ever fumbled for a business card, misplaced one that you
needed or completely forgotten where or when or even why you got one,
Zimmerman's device could be the solution.
The touch connects an extremely low frequency electrical current
through both bodies. The current carries the data into whatever device
the user chooses: A palm-top computer, a cellular phone, even a pager.
Besides allowing data exchange between two people, the ''PAN'' would
let people who carry multiple electronic devices share information
quickly between them. Just got a page? Your cell phone already has the
number dialed and ready to call. Can't remember when you last called
someone? Your electronic organizer recorded the time and date last
time you dialed the number.
''We've had WANs (wide area networks) connecting the world and we've
had LANs (local area networks) connecting computers in offices,''
Zimmerman explained. ''Think of the body as a walking office. What
makes more sense than a PAN?''
It may make sense, but it's still so far from being a commercial
product that IBM won't even guess when consumers might see something
like it on store shelves.
It's a typical quandary for a ''deep thinker'' researcher like
Zimmerman, who has invented and patented far more devices than he's
ever seen sold to anyone.
Zimmerman began working on the PAN concept with Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor Neil Gershenfeld nearly two years
ago. A group of MIT students had asked the school's Media Lab to help
them develop a ''body net,'' a way of connecting cellular phones and
pagers. The students couldn't figure out how to wire the devices
without creating an unwieldy body harness.
At the time, Zimmerman had been experimenting with a low-frequency
current to create a musical trick for magician Penn Jillette of the
magic/comic duo Penn and Teller. Sitting in a special ''electric
chair,'' the current would flow through Penn's body and detect where
his fingers were as he waved his hands like a conductor. As each
finger changed position, the chair would signal a computer to emit a
different musical note.
Zimmerman and Gershenfeld realized that they could use the same
concept to move data through the human body.
''But we thought, why stop there?'' Zimmerman said. ''We realized we
could communicate things to the body and off the body by touch.''
Simple, $20 device
Zimmerman continued the research when he moved to IBM's Almaden
Research Center in San Jose. The results are deceptively simple: Two
palm-sized devices that cost about $20 to make.
To demonstrate the product, Zimmerman has one person place a foot on
the transmitter and another person place a foot on the receiver. When
the two shake hands, data flows from one to the other. Zimmerman hooks
the two devices up to a laptop computer so that observers can see the
data -- in this case, his business card -- written onto the screen.
The electrical current used measures less than one one-thousandth the
power of the average static electricity shock, he said. Yet static
electricity disperses so completely through the human body that it has
no impact on the PAN when it does discharge.
The prototype can move data about as fast as a 2400-baud modem can --
in other words, not very fast by today's standards. But Zimmerman said
there are no technical barriers to speeding that up significantly.
The touch that's involved also need not even be skin-to-skin; placing
a hand on a shoulder, rubbing elbows through shirt fabric, or touching
one shoe to another is just as effective.
Data also can flow through more than one person. Zimmerman delights in
watching corporate executives join hands in groups of three or four to
watch the data flow onto the screen.
Simple as the demonstration may be, the implications of what could
result are myriad.
The PAN plays into a concept called ''contagious information,''
Zimmerman said, in which data is exchanged ''by proximity and
predisposition.''
To illustrate, Zimmerman describes the typical day of tomorrow's PAN
user.
Inside the PAN user's refrigerator is a gallon of milk that is nearly
empty. A cheap electronic ''tag'' on the milk alerts the computer in
the refrigerator that it needs to be replaced. The refrigerator's
computer relays that information to the house's central information
computer.
PAN handling the shopping
When the PAN user walks out the door in the morning, a computer in his
shoe gets a shopping list from the house's central computer via a
device in the front door mat. Later that day, when the PAN user walks
into a mini-mart for a Slurpee, the doormat at the mini-mart informs
the shoe computer that this is a store that carries milk. The PAN
sends a signal from the shoe to the user's wrist watch, reminding him
that he needs milk and this store just happens to have it.
''It's a futuristic scenario, but it illustrates how the computer can
use you as a device,'' Zimmerman said.
''It's been a long time since I've read science fiction,'' he said.
''I seem to be part of it instead of reading it.''
Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park laughed with
delight when the PAN was described to him.
''Now that is new and that's really cool,'' he said. ''I wondered when
someone was going to do that.
''It certainly opens up a whole new way to spread computer viruses,''
he joked.
Such personal networks have been experimented with before, Saffo said,
but using either infrared or radio waves to transmit information.
Mark Weiser, chief technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center,
said his team has developed a computer-on-a-keychain that can send and
receive information via infrared at the touch of a button. Besides
allowing the quickrtr exchange of business card information, the
device can be used as a personal computer remote control.
''Tom's system may have the problem that people may not want to
exchange information with everyone they touch,'' Weiser said. ''Maybe
taking something from your pocket and pointing it at someone after
you've shaken hands will be the next level of acceptable intimacy.
'Bad' touching
''What if the person whose hand I'm shaking, what if their computer
sucks information out of me that I don't want to be transferred?'' he
said. ''How do we ensure privacy in this world where there are
machines all around us helping us do things, but they know things
about us. Who are they going to tell that we don't want to be told?''
Still, he said, the network that ties together the myriad computers in
tomorrow's world probably will be an amalgam of his technology,
Zimmerman's technology and technologies yet to be.
Zimmerman said the problem with using infrared is that it requires
devices to be within sight of each other; a cell phone on one hip and
a pager on the other couldn't communicate through infrared. Radio
transmissions create a series of problems: Possible broadcast of
private information to unintended recipients; Federal Communications
Commission limits on radio transmitting devices; and the possibility
of one person's PAN ''jamming'' another's.
''This is novel and (it) suggests all sorts of cool possibilities,''
Saffo said. ''Imagine a subcutaneous computer embedded in cattle that
keeps a running record of which cow bumped into another cow, so you
know where diseases spread. That's a purely random thought that just
occurred to me.''
Zimmerman declined to discuss specific products that IBM might be
developing with the PAN technology. But he agreed that new
possibilities occur to him every day.
''I think this is as significant to interpersonal communications as
wire's invention was to the telephone,'' he said.
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