Meta showed off its futuristic wristband again, this time with a scientific paper in the journal Nature.
Meta is back to teasing its futuristic body-reading wristband, and this time around, it’s getting a little more specific with what the wearable can do. In short? It looks like all that high-level research is paying off. Meta published a new research paper in the journal Nature, showcasing progress on its sEMG-RD wearable, a device that was most recently shown at its Connect conference in 2024. That device, using sensors on a wristband, can read electrical signals in your muscles and translate them into inputs on a computer. With such a body-to-computer interface, users are able to control stuff on a screen, move a mouse cursor or windows, and open apps, all without ever physically touching a controller. Pretty neat.
While all of that is fairly similar to what Meta has teased before—it’s been working on a similar device since 2021—according to researchers, the latest prototype boasts some key improvements over predecessors. For one, previous versions of such a device needed to be trained on specific individuals to work, but this prototype uses a neural network to quickly assess the signals from whoever is wearing the wristband and can then tailor the device to that user.
