MouthPad: A Tongue-Controlled Touchpad | Hacker News Reader

MouthPad: A Tongue-Controlled Touchpad

augmental.tech

195 pointsZaninAndrea48 comments

As someone who uses head, eye and facial gesture tracking regularly while doing long medical treatments which tie up both my hands, I would really love something like this.

I never even thought of that use case! What kind of stuff do you do on a computer while doing procedures? Like reference material? Tracking what you’ve done?

A lot less cool than you’d imagine, but hey this is real life. The computer my comfort place, so it’s there to keep my mind occupied and distracted from the treatment’s (iontophoresis) pain. A lot of feel-good scrolling, browsing HN, Reddit, my inbox, multitasking YouTube, etc. If I’m feeling particularly motivated I’ll use STT in my IDE and get some planning done.

For others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iontophoresis

If it can be made comfortable and cheap enough, this could be useful as an interface for AR glasses. The tongue is very sensitive and dextrous, and I imagine that even swipe typing with this kind of touchpad is probably feasible.

So refreshing to see such and interesting innovation in the hardware space! Curious as to what’s the business play here, as at $1400 a piece these don’t seem like mass-market devices. And the high-end market is even more constrained with the size of the subpopulation it is aimed at. Regardless of the business model, fingers crossed that more great assistive tech like this one ships!

Because there is no mass market, relatively speaking.

But they also don't have iso accreditation for medical use.

It's a relatively low volume, customised product, likely with high development costs (even if it doesn't fall under medical device regulations, making something battery- powered that you stick in your mouth is gonna need a good safety case). It's also very valuable to those who use it, so the market can support the high price needed to cover development (the per unit costs are likely much smaller: note you can buy two for nearly the same price as one).

They definitely need to follow regulations as otherwise this misses the entire market that it's aiming at. You are far better of incorporating this into medical settings than just people with disabilities and disposable income.

For devices like this it's not super obvious how well the tradeoff works: the cost of development can multiply, even if the sale price to the insurance companies can go up correspondingly. There's a growing trend of companies developing assistive tech that is affordable without insurance, specifically because the overhead that is added by the insurance and medical device development process is so large (and often questionably valuable to a lot of patients).

I'm not exclusively suggesting the US market. I'm suggesting the rest of the world where you can get a contract and sell in bulk to national healthcare. Whilst I do agree that there are a few companies like this, the negative is discovery and these being unavailable to people who are tech illiterate or unable to set it up which in this case is a significant number. Considering how useful it could be for people with significant paralysis, having a device that your health are provider can't recommend, aid you with, etc would be infuriating.

This seems really clever. I don't know anything about what it takes to serve the targeted needs, so I could be wrong. But it's the sort of thing that pops out as really cool and useful, tech that makes the world better.

This looks great for accessibility specifically. My fiancee is partially-sighted, so (while not directly related) I'm extremely supportive of developments in assistive tech. There's a lot of difference to people's lives that can be made.

For me personally - maybe because I'm not a very nice person, or maybe it's an association that many people would make - clever as the pun in the product name is, it does make me think of saying "mousepad" with a lisp. This seems like a non-ideal association.

I vote we rename it to "Ling", short for "lingual"!

The lady mentioning that she uses it to connect with her vibrator certainly wasn't what I was expecting in a glossy product marketing video. Between that and the video call from Rocky's Australian e-girlfriend(?) the video felt like it was sliding into the surreal near the end.

But, I mean, cool. I hope they have fun with it and it improves their lives.

Somewhat tangentially related, I sometimes use my (above average sized) nose to swipe away notifications on my smartwatch when I'm holding things on both hands and don't feel like putting anything down. My wife always finds this incredibly amusing, but given the length I feel like I might as well use it for something!

Big tech will harvest your mewing data now

The promotion video popup up in my YT feed yesterday, it has been a long time that I didn't see innovation that helps people to fulfil their passion. I wish them a huge success!

This is a very novel UX and assistive tech, and I know more users globally (and in India for me) would find this useful.

The price seems high for straight to end user sales avoiding the medical regulations needed for use in medical settings. I'm curious why that is and also why you wouldn't design with iso accreditation in mind and get approval. That opens up the market far more.

Surgery robots have a tongue controller. It takes a while to train on that, but when you‘re trained your tongue muscle is the most precise way to control, say, subtle incisions deep inside the brain.

Do you have a link to those? It seems ... somewhat implausible.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11118463/

If anybody reading this wants to hire someone to devote their life to this tech, hit me up. Autistic special interest.

That’s cool but also definitely not the same thing that GP claimed.

A doctor told me that a few years ago, but googling it myself now, I don‘t find anything, either. I think I missed a joke back then.

Flag my comment, it‘s wrong.

No need to flag, I don't think - hopefully if someone's reading it, they're seeing your reply to me as well.

And maybe you didn't miss a joke, maybe your doctor had tongue-driven brain surgery? :P

Super cool. I was thinking about using a ThinkPad trackpoint instead of a touch pad. But as far as I know there is no water resistant trackpoint device.

Does it work? There seem to be screenshots and nuanced wordings that implies it's currently more often configured like a gyro mouse with a touch button...

As a replacement for a desktop user's mouse? No. Could write paragraphs about how it's a special niche, and the device shines in that niche.

I've been in the HCI-enthusiast space due to carpal tunnel for a while now. I actually caused myself to have to have the surgery after going all out with QMK mouse keys, which ended up just moving the problem to a different set of fingers. (So maybe not an expert.)

The part I'm not sure is if they have precise tongue location working, of if they have resorted to the pad as mostly just hot corners. I don't have that much doubt about the concept.

Wonder if tongue would get tired from it or not an issue.

At first yes but just like any muscle it would adapt and probably quickly.

One of the strongest muscles in the body, too. Along with your jaw and uterus.

People using these are about to develop some pretty interesting accents.

Haven’t these existed before for military purposes?

I remember reading about tongue based sonar for divers, where the output of the sonar would stimulate electrodes on various parts of the tongue to indicate relative direction.

I can see exam candidates having mouth inspections in the future.

As much as I'd like to support this, $1400 places it squarely in the "disability tax" bracket that accompanies products targeting this market.

Are you saying the company is overcharging people 10-1,000x?

(That would let Google Glass also fall squarely into this bracket...)

Perfect the enemy of the good there?

The more support they get, the easier it becomes to justify dropping the price. The more likely a cheaper competitor shows up.

Would this product have launched if a minimal profit cap were regulatorily mandated?

chocolate flavored touchpad please

Step aside Codex Micro!

it's magic!

great vision and insight to problems.

Now I'm not saying I will hook it up to the https://buttplug.io/ API, but I am saying someone is going to.

Love the name.

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