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Doing something useful with Plugs?

John

September 2012

edited February 2015

in Prosthetics, wearables, and haptics

I was thinking about stretching my ears, but i have a hard time paying for something for just its aesthetics.(even the small amount stretching will cost)  So i decided i'd try to find a use for the empty space that is there.  I'm thinking of stretching up to 1 inch, so it will provide room for a small circuit board(ever opened a cfl bulb?). And being that there are two of them a wire could be used to connect the two if necessary.  

I'm looking for ideas, i have a few but not anything too interesting,  ill list them below:

A bluetooth headset with a short wire to the earbud(or maybe even a small speaker built into the plug but it wouldn't work well in high noise areas. 

A stereo bluetooth headphone.

A pair of condenser mics for binaural recording(probably going to have to use google for that one).  I'd have my portable recorder in my pocket. 

All three of those could have all the parts taken from devices that already exist. 

Also i was wondering whether putting a decent sized magnet in the plug would lead to any sensation. But it obviously would never be as sensitive as a finger.

Comments

1. 

   ThomasEgi

   
   September 2012
   stretching as in "stretching a piece of rubber" or stretching as in "creating a hole like those tube-things people get these days" ?
   
   if you create a hole/tube/ to put stuff into it, easy enough. you can probably just crack open a 3$  bluetooth headset and build a new case for it.
   
   as for the microphones, a 1 inch hole does sound big, but a good mic capsule will be half an inch already. and if you like to have good sound quality, the mic-amplifier circuits will be rather big,too (especially the power supply). not to mention the EM shielding and the recording device itself. i mean. don't get me wrong, a microphone does fit in there, but don't expect studio-quality. i'd be more like what you get from a good pc-headset.
   there would be not much "bio"hacking involved here tho.
   
   in case you meant 'stretching as in rubberstretching' that would imply your microphone would be under the skin.that  won't work due to moisture , and the skin would filter out higher frequencies, so sound quality would suffer too.
   
2. 

   Ian

   
   September 2012
   @ThomasEgi:  I strongly suspect that he meant the second one, since a) he talked about making use of the resulting "empty space," and b) does anyone even do the former?
   
   @John:  At first, I was thinking about putting in two bluetooth headphones, one of which also has a small mic attached to it, so you could have a (stereo) hands-free device that would just look like ordinary jewellery; I do know that they make earrings that do something similar.  However, I'm still wondering if you could fit both a headphone and a mic in a single ear plug.
   
3. 

   Jakon
   September 2012
   a conch punch would work sweet for a little speaker with a bluetooth in the lobe
   
4. 

   John
   September 2012

   Ya, I meant stretching as in stretching your earlobes like a lot of kids do these days.

   I feel like it would be a good place for me to start working with small electronics that must be fairly bio safe. 

   "crack open a 3$  bluetooth headset and build a new case for it"

   That is exactly what I was thinking. But with that I could try an inductive charging system.

   I have a pair of Naiant U-O's and are fantastic tiny condensers.  I'm already loving what I hear from them. the majority of the space is taken by the jack at the bottom. It would just be a matter of replacing that with something low profile. 
   It would be extremely easy and like you said not really a biohack.  Thats why I was looking for Ideas, things to do to plugs which might be useful, especially if they "interact" in some way with other cyborg implants. Or at least would get me building circuits that are relatable to those I might later be putting under my skin.

    

5. 

   snark

   
   September 2012
   I read about something like this some days ago. I can't remember where I read it but it points to this page: http://studioblog.designaffairs.com/?p=220 . It's an hearing aid with the electronics stored in the earplug.

   
   

   It's only a design for the moment but it's surely interesting. I hope it will be produced by some company at some point.
6. 

   John
   September 2012
   Wow, thats really cool looking and quite well done. Now, i would like to start trying to do the same thing but with bluetooth.

   Thanks for the link.