During winters, we wear gloves to protect our hands from the chilling cold in our external environment. These days, a lot of people wear gloves and mask as a precautionary measure against the pollution outside. There is one problem when you wear gloves. You have to take them off every time you want to use the touch-screen of your phone. One might just stop worrying about this problem soon as Apple is gearing up to come up with a solution for this.
Apple has been conducting extensive research and hopes to introduce a new technology that will enable iPhones to detect the touch of the hands of the users even when they are wearing gloves. If Apple comes up with a well-tested solution for this, it will be counted as yet another technology discovered ‘first’ by the Cupertino-based giant.
Many phones come with stylus devices that make it quite convenient to use the touch screen even when you are wearing gloves or your hands are dirty. However, not every smartphone comes with a stylus and it is something that one tends to lose very easily. Then, you also see people answering calls with their nose when they find it too inconvenient to take off their gloves!
Apple’s New ‘Gloved-Touch Detection’ Technology
Apple has registered a new patent under the name ‘glove touch detection’ that revolves around using the proximity of the users’ hands to the phone to find out which part of the screen the user wants to touch. According to the patent, detecting touch involves taking into account the touch signals of an input patch in relation to an object in its proximity.
Generally, the screen of an iPhone functions by detecting the movement of the users’ hand or the fingers touching the glass. The iPhone has the kind of mechanism that finds out whether the user has touched the phone with a purpose or a touch happened accidentally. iPhones have the ability to detect a ‘real press’ and find out how close it is to a button or an icon on the screen. It gets to know exactly how long the user has pressed the button for and also distinguishes between a grip and a stabbing finger motion.
The touch screen of a phone fails to recognize the touch of a gloved hand or finger as the touch signal that is generated might not be able to reach the electronic device’s touch detection threshold. This is an issue that Apple seeks to resolve with this new technology.
The patent has been credited to Xiaoqi Zhou and Siddharth Dedhia. Apart from conducting research on how the touch screen of the iPhone would be able to detect gloved fingers, the internal team at Apple is also said to be studying smart gloves.
