With every tech company from Apple to Google reportedly working on a wearable computer to compete with the Pebble and the Sony smart watch, smart watches are definitely a hot topic on the gadget frontier. We can now add Microsoft to the list as the United States Patent and Trademark Office recently published a patent from Microsoft that sounds a lot like a wearable computer.
To be clear, this Microsoft invention isn’t your average smart watch with different time-telling faces. In fact, the application makes no mention of the device’s ability to tell time at all. The technology, as outlined in its application, is all about making data transferring – from using a credit card, logging into your account, to accessing a building or car – as secure and difficult to hack as possible.
What Microsoft described in its paperwork is an “electrical device” that you can wear on your body (like on your wrist). Alternatively, it can be part of the surface of a mobile device, a wallet, or even jewelery. It then uses the wearer’s body part, like your arm or finger, as a “transmission channel” to transfer data through direct physical contact with another device like a computer, smartphone, or even a game console and controller. The idea is that your body part acts as a conduit for the data to travel through, rather than beaming the information wirelessly, which makes it prone to hacking.
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