DIY glove-based tutor indicates muscle-memory potential
A senior editor at IEEE Spectrum worked on a DIY project that enabled his 11-year-old son to improve his touch typing by use of a vibrating glove. His son was already "pretty quick on the keyboard," said his father, David Schneider, but his finger technique could have used some more training. Schneider tried making a glove to serve as a training tool. Eight vibration motors were sewn into the fingers of cycling gloves. He programmed the Arduino to activate a given motor for a quarter of a second corresponding to each character he sent to the microcontroller's serial port—"a "1" would vibrate the motor pressing on the left pinkie, a "2" for the left ring finger, a "3" for the left middle finger, and so forth." He had to write a program that could run on a laptop for his son to associate the stimulation of the fingers with the...