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Cool Patent of the Month – Creepy Crawlies on Your Skin

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Imagine if every time someone called you, your skin vibrated. Sound kind of weird? Well, that’s exactly what Nokia is planning to do with a new piece of patent pending technology called “Haptic Communication”.

What is this new patent application about?

The technology looks fairly simple. It’s just a piece of fabric that “vibrates” according to the strength of a magnetic field. What’s interesting though is that this fabric is attached to your skin. The unusual use is pairing this to a cell phone, so that you – and only you – will be able to know when it rings. I’m sure they’ve got other uses in mind. Imagine a battle zone full of soldiers equipped with multiple patches. Buzz the one on the right arm and the whole platoon heads right. Activate the one on the leg and watch as everyone hits the deck.

Silently communicating with a multitude of people at once…there are plenty of possibilities. Here is an artistic rendering of the technology.

patent nokia haptic tattoos

But, now here’s where it gets really weird. Nokia apparently foresaw that it might seem awkward to have a random patch on your body, so the patent explains how this can be embedded INTO the body in tattoo form. You would just have to use a special ink that responds to the magnetic field.

Now that’s straight out of a James Bond movie. Imagine a spy inking a small birthmark like tattoo into his leg and being able to communicate via Morse Code back to his commanding officers. What if you could activate the technology simply by twitching muscles? It’s a whole new world of communication.

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