Home > News

Tap Strap: Wearable Bluetooth Keyboard Could Be in Your Future

By Laura Tucker
Tap Strap: Wearable Bluetooth Keyboard Could Be in Your Future Featured Image

Bluetooth keyboards have given us a lot of freedom. We don’t have to be sitting right at our keyboard, and we can use a normal keyboard for mobile devices as well. But what if we could have even more freedom?

A new wearable Bluetooth keyboard by Tap Systems is available that will eliminate the need to touch physical keys. Tap Strap can be worn on your knuckles, allowing you to tap any surface to emulate keystrokes.

How Does It Work?

The surprising thing with the Tap Strap is that there is no generated image or any other visual clue to show you where to type. It’s all done from memory using simple typing gestures.

Put the Tap Strap onto your hands by sliding your fingers into the holes, kind of like putting on a glove. The smart fabric it’s constructed of has sensors on the inside to pick up your typing gestures. You can either wear one on one hand for one-handed typing or one on each hand for two-handed typing to make it go much more quickly.

news-tap-strap-fingers

You’ll see the characters appear on the screen as you “type.” You can even do punctuation and special characters using different gestures.

How it works exactly hasn’t been explained, but one report says a single tap from your fingers are vowels, and combinations of your fingers are consonants. It equals out to a possible 31 fingers taps. Tap Systems wants this to be an alternative to voice control and feels this would lead to more privacy.

Because it connects with Bluetooth, is can be used with nearly any mobile device. Those that are typically more difficult or too small to type on, such as VR headsets, smart watches, and streaming devices could benefit from this type of keyboard.

This freedom from a real keyboard will set you back $150.

Being Realistic

The obvious knock against the Tap Strap is that it will cause you to have to relearn a new typing system. If you never really learned to type and have only used a touch screen, this probably won’t be much of a problem for you.

news-tap-strap-phone

However, if you are from an era before digital devices and learned to type the old-fashioned way on a computer keyboard, or if you’re even older and learned to type as a “touch typist” on either an electric or manual typewriter, it could be really hard for you to learn a new system.

You’re also restricted to doing other things while you have that strap on your fingers. It seems as if it would be more difficult to pick up your phone to check your text, take a sip of coffee, eat a snack, flip the channel on the TV, etc. And if you just wanted to type a little bit here and there, you’d be forced into taking it on and off your hands continuously.

Will It Be Successful?

Looking at the disadvantages of it, the Tap Strap doesn’t might not be replacing other Bluetooth keyboards meant for mobiles. But maybe Tap Systems is onto something. Maybe there’s a more efficient typing system that we have yet to “tap” into.

What do you think of this wearable Bluetooth keyboard? Would you be interested in using something like this? Or do you prefer the old tried-and-true method of typing?

Add your thoughts in the comments below and let us know how you feel about the Tap Strap!

Image Credit: Twitter

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.