New Google patent reveals plans to incorporate skin gestures on wearables

Just as we were talking about the highly-anticipated release of the Pixel Watch and how Google is acquiring new talent and patents for their audio devices, news comes to us from Let’s Go Digital of a patent filed back in mid-2020 that may hint at some added functionality for both the Pixel Watch and the Google Pixel buds if this wild tech ends up in either of these devices.

The documentation for the patent titled “Skin interface for wearables: Sensor fusion to improve signal quality” was just approved and published on March 3rd and reveals that Google intends to implement swipe or tap gestures that can be made directly on the skin around the device, as opposed to the device itself. These gestures will then be detected by the device accelerometers and determine an input command. This technology could be applied to a variety of wearables such as earbuds, smartwatches, VR headsets, smart glasses, etc. The patent describes it working as follows:

The gesture of the user may provide a mechanical wave that propagates through the portion of a body of the user between an input region and wearable device. The accelerometers may receive the mechanical wave as input.

WIPO Patent

The patent argues that physical inputs – such as tapping the surface of a device to do things such as starting or stopping content, adjusting playback volume, or fast-forwarding/rewinding content – may provide undesirable noise or discomfort to the user, as well as affect the antenna performance.

The Pixel Buds in particular have been plagued since their release with audio cutout issues and no amount of software updates have provided a permanent fix. I can’t help but wonder if Google plans to implement the skin gestures in order to avoid users touching the hardware and inadvertently causing the cutouts.

Also, this isn’t the first technology of its kind. Sony very recently released their Link Buds that have very similar functionality. However, the question remains whether this will get past the patent stage and come to fruition. I would be very interested in a Pixel Watch offering this type of functionality and providing an even larger touch area than what I would get if I only had the watch face to work with.

We know that Google is no stranger to experimenting with new tech in order to add new features to their devices. Remember Project Soli? Successfully implemented or not, Soli opened the door to many possibilities, some of which I speculate are influencing this very patent. Let’s hope we see this come to pass.