Panasonic plans to use your body like a LAN!

Your body can transmit all kinds of things to another person — sounds, germs, emotions. Panasonic figures if it can already do all those things then it should be able to transmit data, too!

What Panasonic showed off at CEATEC (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) in Japan is similar to what a team of researchers at the University of Washington did when they figured out how to securely transmit authentication tokens through a person’s body. However, Panasonic is experimenting with more diverse applications.

They call it the Human Body Communication Device. Take a look at the photo above, you can see their booth attendants giving a quick demo: one woman is causing the other’s skirt to change colour. With a simple grasp of the hand, the skirt changes from white to the colour that’s set on the watch — in this case, orange.

It’s a very simple application, but Panasonic thinks that the Human Body Communication Device has loads of potential. Take the act of exchanging contact information. Sure, it’s easy enough to take out your Smartphones and manually do it yourself… but if you’re going to shake hands anyway then why not let that action take care of the data transmission?

It’s more secure than a wireless data exchange, too, since the information is carried over a physical medium. Sure, eventually someone might come up with a way to sniff data that’s transmitted in this way, but it should be easy enough to avoid. Hopefully you’d notice someone strange touching you or surreptitiously slapping a device on your skin!

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