Whiskers as feedback devices
Tangent from http://discuss.biohack.me/discussion/496/low-tech-approach
Small hairlike whiskers could be attached to devices below the skin. These whiskers could stimulate the skin from below in a small, focused region. This has the advantage of not diffusing the movement of your device over a large surface area. Imagine a finger magnet that has all the tactile vibration on a couple of nerve ends rather than the whole surface of the magnet.
What do people think of the idea? What are possible materials? Should they be transdermal or subdermal?
Small hairlike whiskers could be attached to devices below the skin. These whiskers could stimulate the skin from below in a small, focused region. This has the advantage of not diffusing the movement of your device over a large surface area. Imagine a finger magnet that has all the tactile vibration on a couple of nerve ends rather than the whole surface of the magnet.
What do people think of the idea? What are possible materials? Should they be transdermal or subdermal?
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medical stainless steel would be a good choice. Suture string ,too.
Fishing line, sugru, hot glue... not exactly the first choice, if you can, stay away from them. While they might work, they are not made for contact with body-internals, so they might have inpurities or are contaminated. So if you can, stay away from them.
About materials:
http://discuss.biohack.me/discussion/474/materials-for-implantation
Materials certified for long-term implantation are rare and expensive. You can get a lot of materials which are certified for at least short term contact. It's not perfect but at least they comply to quality an purity standard, so chances of bad side effects are a lot lower than with fishing rods and stuff.
For more materials have a look at the wiki
http://collaborate.biohack.me/Textbooks
The standard handbook linked there contains a good selection of materials including polymers, glass and ceramics. Once you know what you'r looking for, you can start searching for the item with the desired quality.
Aside from the feasibility of materials, what do people think of the concept of using whiskers?
The original idea was to have a small whisker leaving an implant to mechanically stimulate a small area of tissue (instead of distributing the motion across the entire surface of the implant like with the current magnet implants).So it's not the kind of whiskers you find on many animals.
Just wanted to bring this to attention.
From a durability standpoint a rigid whisker is the easiest to maintain. From a human standpoint a flexible whisker is the most similar to what our bodies use. What does everyone think about flexible and rigid whiskers?
@Mitravelus I've thought that would be cool too. I can see a lot of things you could do with it. I don't know that pitch shifting is mechanically feasible especially at those low frequencies but I'm not a sound guy. If you start a new thread with that as the topic I'll chime in there.
Originally discussed here: http://discuss.biohack.me/discussion/342
I wouldn't mind some danglers like a catfish has. I quit shaving because it took away too much of my drinking time, so I'm not worried about problems there. This project looks interesting.
Ingrown hairs are a pain. Would it work to use human hair as a feedback whisker? If someone were to cut off one of their own hairs, integrate it into a project and implant it, how long would it last? Would the body dissolve it quickly or just ignore it?