The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

On both the top and bottom surfaces of the display is a matching matrix of field-producing pixels. The top surface also enables touch-screen control through the skin. Instead of ink, the display uses tiny microscopic spheres, somewhat similar to tattoo ink. A field-sensitive material in the spheres changes their color from clear to black, aligned with the matrix fields.

The tattoo display communicates wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices – both in the outside world and within the same body. Although the device is always on (as long as your blood´s flowing), the display can be turned off and on by pushing a small dot on the skin. When the phone rings, for example, an individual turns the display on, and “the tattoo comes to life as a digital video of the caller,” Mielke explains. When the call ends, the tattoo disappears.

Could such an invasive device have harmful biological effects? Actually, the device could offer health benefits. That´s because it also continually monitors for many blood disorders, alerting the person of a health problem.

The tattoo display is still just a concept, with no word on plans for commercialization.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXW0M-AUIc

The iPhone architecturally has a major limitation in that it does not allow for third-party background applications to run. However, the Apple iPhone “Push Notification” helps overcome this weakness as far as delivering information to applications that have pending external data. Examples of this include mail, voicemail and third-party applications such as “ABC News” which pushes alerts regarding breaking news stories. But what if you wanted an app that uses an external Bluetooth watch as was described in one of my previous blogs, or say you wanted an external microphone that when you pushed a button on it, it would launch an application to record a memo from the microphone or perhaps operate as a push-to-talk walkie-talkie. Of course Apple could facilitate their own applications to do this by hooking into the OS. An example of this is that of allowing iTunes to play while using another application.

What would be useful is an extension on the iPhone so that external devices could wake it up and service those devices with applications that are either pre-mapped to those devices or applications that generically know how to service requests from those devices. It would accept real-time event triggers from external devices which would cause applications to run. This in itself has some other major implications that I won’t jump into too deeply here. If for instance a user was on a phone call and such an input comes in from an external device, a response to it might be blocked or temporarily blocked by the OS while the phone call was occurring.

Such an interface is shown in the top picture. The devices 1,2,3 & 4 represent a plurality of peripheral devices which could interface to the iPhone. Such devices may interface via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, wired, or any other future interface to the device. The box labeled “OS Monitoring External Devices” would be a real time extension that would be effectively connected/paired to such devices and if they made a request, the application that that are associated with could be launched and the connection transferred or the data path from such devices redirected to such applications. The applications App 1, App 2, App 3, and App4 illustrates the support of a plurality of applications that could be either individually executed when an even occurs or which could concurrently execute if there is an event trigger for more than one application. The applications could be paused if a higher priority event occurs such as making or receiving a phone call. The second image is an example of how such an arrangement would function In this example, a Bluetooth microphone which could provide wake on sound or push to talk, would trigger an application to run to support its input.