How would it feel if with a few flick of your fingers or tapping on your arms you could listen to music or switch on your television? It does sound far fetched but a Carnegie Mellon student along with Microsoft have developed a method called the Skinput that allows the forearm to act as an interactive surface. That’s not all, it can also be used as a switch board to control  functioning of gadgets [like cellphone] by just tapping on the different parts of the forearm. You need not bring out the cell phone out of your pocket; you control it by tapping your arms.

The innovative design also allows the arm to be used as a keyboard when a pico-projector is attached to the arm band. For example, you could compose an email and send it without even touching your cellphone! The project was in ‘research mode’ for about eight months and needs further fine tuning for it to be available commercially (which could take two to seven years). Skinput as of now uses an arm band lined with sensors that translates the tapping on the arms into signals for commanding the phone via bluetooth.

[source: cnn.com]