Imagine starting your car, making a call on your smartphone, operating your smart TV and switching on fans and lights with your thumb. Sounds like Science Fiction? Think again. That’s what ‘Fin’, developed by RHL Vision, a young robotics company incubated at Startup Village, Kochi, proposes to do through a flexible silica ring.

The Bluetooth-enabled Fin turns your fingers into a numerical keypad by assigning numbers from 0 to 9 to sections of the fingers; you can make a call on your smartphone by tapping these sections with your thumb.

“You can wear Fin on your thumb and turn your palm into a digital touch interface,” says Rohildev. N., founder-CEO of RHL Vision (RHL stands for Robotic Human Logic). “It helps make digital interactions as natural and as simple as possible,” adds the 23-year-old software engineer.

At your fingertips The RHL team hit upon the concept while playing around with the idea of using touchless gestures to control smart gadgets.

“Since most people use the thumb to make or receive calls on mobile phones and operate TV remotes, we tracked thumb movements and came up with the idea of using sections of fingers as a keypad,” says Rohildev.

RHL Vision has a seven-member team, most of whom had just finished college when the start-up was launched a year ago. The starry-eyed youths hope Fin will take the company places.

The start-up was one of the companies featured prominently at technology media entity TechCrunch’s consumer electronics show, Hardware Battlefield, in Las Vegas earlier this month. Fin was the only hardware product chosen for the show from India. It was also an eye-catcher at the 2013 Pioneer Festival in Vienna.

Thumb rule “Fin has sensors that can detect finger taps and swipes and identify sections of the palm by calculating their distance from the thumb,” says Rohildev. “Using Bluetooth for communication, Fin transmits thumb gestures as commands to connected devices such as mobile phones, smart TVs and head-mounted devices.”

Fin can remote-control three devices at a time. For instance, it can act as a car key, smartphone and car stereo.

“We have designed it as a standalone product, but when integrated with other systems, its possibilities are limitless,” says Rohildev.

The RHL team believes it will work well with head-mounted-displays, which they feel will be a hit next year. When integrated with digital aids for physically-challenged people, Fin could become a major handicapped-friendly device.

The market version of Fin, to be made of flexible silica material, will be launched in September. The product is now priced at $110.

The start-up has launched a campaign on the crowd-funding website Indiegogo ( >http://igg.me/at/wearfin ) to raise $100,000.

“Many international companies have approached us to get Fin integrated with their systems,” says Rohildev. “We are looking for the right partners.”

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