MYO. If you pay SR600 to order it by credit card today, you won't get it until early 2014, but hopefully it will be worth the wait. I've paid up and so have more than 25,000 other people in 129 countries. What are we buying? Essentially, it's a remote control allowing a person to interface by gesture with Bluetooth enabled devices. MYO, from Thalmic Labs in Waterloo, Canada, is an armband worn on the forearm that senses electrical activity in the muscles, allowing its wearers to interact with digital technologies using just their fingers and hands. Unlike other gesture control devices, such as the ones in video game consoles, it doesn't require a camera to sense wearers' movements, freeing them from the confines of a fixed space to maintain connection with the device being controlled. The device can connect wirelessly to computers, mobile devices and other electronics over a Bluetooth Low Energy connection. MYO is a commercial implementation of electromyography and it has applications in wearable computing, human-computer interaction, entertainment, warfare and robotics. Get a taste of some of MYO's possibilities by watching the video at https://www.thalmic.com/myo/# “As a company, we're interested in how we can use technology to enhance our abilities as humans – in short, giving us ‘superpowers,'” explained Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs on the motivation behind MYO. “We're excited to see how the MYO blurs the lines between us and digital technology.” MYO interfaces out of the box with things people already own - for instance a Mac or Windows computer. Slip on Thalmic's MYO and control presentations, video, content, games, browse the web, create music, edit videos and much more. The uses for MYO will just grow. Thalmic Labs is also launching the MYO API for iOS and Android this summer, that will allow developers to utilize the device's sophisticated hardware to experiment, build and eventually profit from applications of MYO technology. How does MYO work? The one size fits all armband uses Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy to communicate with paired devices. It features on-board, rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries, and an ARM processor. MYO is outfitted with Thalmic Labs' proprietary muscle activity sensors. It also features a 6-axis inertial measurement unit. To be in command, the wearer employs a unique “on/off” gesture to enable and disable MYO control. MYO alerts the wearer via haptic feedback when it is enabled and detecting movement. MYO detects gestures and movements in two ways, though muscle activity and motion sensing. When sensing the muscle movements of the user, MYO can detect changes down to individual fingers. When tracking the position of the arm and hand, MYO is aware of subtle movements and rotations in all directions. Movements are detected rapidly. It can even appear that the gesture is recognized before the wearer's hand moves. This is because the body's nervous system actually activates the muscles slightly before the hand or fingers start moving and it is that muscle activation that MYO senses and interprets. The implications of this are sure to be investigated by developers for use by the handicapped, the elderly and even the military, where it will be advantageous to use the mind to just activate a muscle pathway to provoke an action - with perhaps no need for follow through. For the average wearer though, MYO will simply be a way to effortlessly interact with the digital world.
