There have been news reports of children being choked by the belt portions of child safety seats. I have personally had the experience of hearing noise from the back seat, where my daughter was seated in a child safety seat, turning to look, and seeing that the child safety seat had fallen over with her in it.  I thought that it would be convenient to embed a Shokac Cube in the belt and use it to display an alert on the car navigation screen, so I developed this demonstration unit.

We created this demonstration unit for an automobile industry trade show. The seat has Shokac Cubes embedded in it. To reduce the number of sensors, they were spaced far apart, but we used an overall deformation algorithm to perform the “posture navigation” shown at the top right of the screen. Needless to say, the person in the seat cannot feel the sensors at all.

We created a demonstration unit that showcases the features of this sensor. It can be seen in parts shops in locations such as Akihabara. Users can pick up the sensor and extremely intuitively control the lights in the LED tower, so it has been very well received.

Our multi-axis tactile sensors are extraordinarily small, so they can be embedded in wearable devices. This demonstration unit is a shoe sole, but there are examples of the same concepts being used inside shoes or even on watches.These sensors can be used to create interfaces in places which in the past have not been spacious enough to fit sensors.

This is probably the demonstration unit that provides the clearest example of how compact tactile sensors can be used. Only Touchence has fingertip-sized sensors can detect force along multiple axes.