"Can touch this"

Gadget uses human body to network electronic business cards, smart devices Published: Oct. 21, 1996 BY JANET RAE-DUPREE Mercury News Staff Writer Everything a business person needs to know about IBM researcher Tom Zimmerman is just a touch away. Zimmerman has created a ''personal area network,'' an electronic gizmo that could bring a whole new meaning to the power of the handshake. The prototype system allows users to exchange business card information, or just about any other data, simply by touching one another. If you've ever fumbled for a business card, misplaced one that you needed or completely forgotten where or when or even why you got one, Zimmerman's device could be the solution. The touch connects an extremely low frequency electrical current through both bodies. The current carries the data into whatever device the user chooses: A palm-top computer, a cellular phone, even a pager. Besides allowing data exchange between two people, the ''PAN'' would let people who carry multiple electronic devices share information quickly between them. Just got a page? Your cell phone already has the number dialed and ready to call. Can't remember when you last called someone? Your electronic organizer recorded the time and date last time you dialed the number. ''We've had WANs (wide area networks) connecting the world and we've had LANs (local area networks) connecting computers in offices,'' Zimmerman explained. ''Think of the body as a walking office. What makes more sense than a PAN?'' It may make sense, but it's still so far from being a commercial product that IBM won't even guess when consumers might see something like it on store shelves. It's a typical quandary for a ''deep thinker'' researcher like Zimmerman, who has invented and patented far more devices than he's ever seen sold to anyone. Zimmerman began working on the PAN concept with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Neil Gershenfeld nearly two years ago. A group of MIT students had asked the school's Media Lab to help them develop a ''body net,'' a way of connecting cellular phones and pagers. The students couldn't figure out how to wire the devices without creating an unwieldy body harness. At the time, Zimmerman had been experimenting with a low-frequency current to create a musical trick for magician Penn Jillette of the magic/comic duo Penn and Teller. Sitting in a special ''electric chair,'' the current would flow through Penn's body and detect where his fingers were as he waved his hands like a conductor. As each finger changed position, the chair would signal a computer to emit a different musical note. Zimmerman and Gershenfeld realized that they could use the same concept to move data through the human body. ''But we thought, why stop there?'' Zimmerman said. ''We realized we could communicate things to the body and off the body by touch.'' Simple, $20 device Zimmerman continued the research when he moved to IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. The results are deceptively simple: Two palm-sized devices that cost about $20 to make. To demonstrate the product, Zimmerman has one person place a foot on the transmitter and another person place a foot on the receiver. When the two shake hands, data flows from one to the other. Zimmerman hooks the two devices up to a laptop computer so that observers can see the data -- in this case, his business card -- written onto the screen. The electrical current used measures less than one one-thousandth the power of the average static electricity shock, he said. Yet static electricity disperses so completely through the human body that it has no impact on the PAN when it does discharge. The prototype can move data about as fast as a 2400-baud modem can -- in other words, not very fast by today's standards. But Zimmerman said there are no technical barriers to speeding that up significantly. The touch that's involved also need not even be skin-to-skin; placing a hand on a shoulder, rubbing elbows through shirt fabric, or touching one shoe to another is just as effective. Data also can flow through more than one person. Zimmerman delights in watching corporate executives join hands in groups of three or four to watch the data flow onto the screen. Simple as the demonstration may be, the implications of what could result are myriad. The PAN plays into a concept called ''contagious information,'' Zimmerman said, in which data is exchanged ''by proximity and predisposition.'' To illustrate, Zimmerman describes the typical day of tomorrow's PAN user. Inside the PAN user's refrigerator is a gallon of milk that is nearly empty. A cheap electronic ''tag'' on the milk alerts the computer in the refrigerator that it needs to be replaced. The refrigerator's computer relays that information to the house's central information computer. PAN handling the shopping When the PAN user walks out the door in the morning, a computer in his shoe gets a shopping list from the house's central computer via a device in the front door mat. Later that day, when the PAN user walks into a mini-mart for a Slurpee, the doormat at the mini-mart informs the shoe computer that this is a store that carries milk. The PAN sends a signal from the shoe to the user's wrist watch, reminding him that he needs milk and this store just happens to have it. ''It's a futuristic scenario, but it illustrates how the computer can use you as a device,'' Zimmerman said. ''It's been a long time since I've read science fiction,'' he said. ''I seem to be part of it instead of reading it.'' Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park laughed with delight when the PAN was described to him. ''Now that is new and that's really cool,'' he said. ''I wondered when someone was going to do that. ''It certainly opens up a whole new way to spread computer viruses,'' he joked.. Such personal networks have been experimented with before, Saffo said, but using either infrared or radio waves to transmit information. Mark Weiser, chief technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, said his team has developed a computer-on-a-keychain that can send and receive information via infrared at the touch of a button. Besides allowing the quicker exchange of business card information, the device can be used as a personal computer remote control. ''Tom's system may have the problem that people may not want to exchange information with everyone they touch,'' Weiser said. ''Maybe taking something from your pocket and pointing it at someone after you've shaken hands will be the next level of acceptable intimacy. 'Bad' touching ''What if the person whose hand I'm shaking, what if their computer sucks information out of me that I don't want to be transferred?'' he said. ''How do we ensure privacy in this world where there are machines all around us helping us do things, but they know things about us. Who are they going to tell that we don't want to be told?'' Still, he said, the network that ties together the myriad computers in tomorrow's world probably will be an amalgam of his technology, Zimmerman's technology and technologies yet to be. Zimmerman said the problem with using infrared is that it requires devices to be within sight of each other; a cell phone on one hip and a pager on the other couldn't communicate through infrared. Radio transmissions create a series of problems: Possible broadcast of private information to unintended recipients; Federal Communications Commission limits on radio transmitting devices; and the possibility of one person's PAN ''jamming'' another's. ''This is novel and (it) suggests all sorts of cool possibilities,'' Saffo said. ''Imagine a subcutaneous computer embedded in cattle that keeps a running record of which cow bumped into another cow, so you know where diseases spread. That's a purely random thought that just occurred to me.'' Zimmerman declined to discuss specific products that IBM might be developing with the PAN technology. But he agreed that new possibilities occur to him every day. ''I think this is as significant to interpersonal communications as wire's invention was to the telephone,'' he said.