|27 January 2017|


Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a variety of innovative ways to control smartwatches – including with your breath.

Using LG and Sony watches a team, led by Ph.D. student Gabriel Reyes, created a pioneering hands-free option to control the smart device. He took inspiration from watching his wife blow a piece of fuzz off her phone while holding their newborn son. The students went on to create Whoosh, a technique which means an individual can blow, shush, exhale, sip or puff on a screen to control it. The watch uses its microphone and machine learning to identify the breath patterns of each acoustic event, then assigns an action to each. For example, a wearer can shush the watch to ignore a call or blow on it twice to accept.

The team are delighted they’ve proven the technology works and believe it could have potential for people with disabilities.


Selecting numbers by tapping the back of your hand and scrolling through apps running your fingers along the watch band were some of the other innovative techniques the team demonstrated in their research presented at a series of conferences last year.