Phone on your finger

Masaaki Fukumoto came up with fingerphone idea Japanese mobile operator DoCoMo showed the fruits of some of its research into mobiles with its Ubi-Wa, a ring that turns your finger into a phone receiver. Ubi-Wa has two meanings in Japanese - "Finger ring" and "Speak by finger" - which is exactly what it lets you do. In noisy places where you cannot hear who you are calling, you simply place the Ubi-Wa bearing finger in the ear. The ring converts speech sounds to vibrations. These travel down the bone and into the ear canal, which obligingly turns them back into intelligible speech. DoCoMo is continuing the development of the ring. As it shrinks, it will be too small to sport functioning buttons. The solution is to tap out predefined rhythms with your thumb and the finger that is wearing the ring. Each unique rhythm carries out a different function. They call this UbiButton. Unlike much research which remains as vapour-ware, this actually works. Having tried it, the call clarity is impressive and it was simple to make and end calls.