Thumb Typing

From: Technology Review - 07/2002

As computers blend into our environment and even our clothing, entering data
into them gets tricky. Carsten Mehring, a mechanical engineer at the
University of California, Irvine, has come up with a device that turns your
hands into a qwerty-style keyboard. Mehring's device uses six conductive
contacts on each thumb-three on the front and three on the back-to represent
a keyboard's three lettered rows. Contacts on the tips of the remaining eight
fingers represent its columns. Touching the right index finger to the middle
contact on the front of the right thumb, for instance, generates a j. The top
contact on the thumb yields a u, while the middle contact on the back of the
thumb would produce an h. Mehring says the similarity to typing makes his
input device easier to master than others that require an entirely different
set of motions. He has applied for a patent and hopes to market a product by
year-end.

Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/12893/page8/

Links:
Carsten Mehring
http://www.eng.uci.edu/~cmehring/index.html

Kitty Project
http://gram.eng.uci.edu/~cmehring/KITTY/about-kitty.html