A touching development

"My collaborators and I are developing a low latency communication technology which we hope will get us closer to developing a method to allow geographically separated families to 'touch' over the internet," Hou says.

For a person to touch something or someone remotely using the tactile internet, the user would wear a highly sensitive glove, or other type of device, which can render the sense of touch and transfer that sensation to the user. At the other end, an actuator device, such as a robotic surrogate, would mimic the movement of the human operator and collect the touch feedback using sensors.

"The tactile internet is still in its early stage. The existing experimental prototypes are mostly in a local area," says Hou.

"The bottleneck is to achieve extremely low delay and highly reliable communication, which is the focus of my research," he says.

Hou and his collaborators, including IoT expert, Professor Branka Vucetic, are designing a new method involving algorithms to achieve zero user-experienced delay for the tactile internet.

"Tactile communication and touch applications will be at the heart of 6G technology and 'industry 5.0', which are both based on next-generation technologies aimed at improving interactions and collaboration between people and machines," says Vucetic.

"To achieve this, our technology is using deep learning (artificial intelligence) to increase reliability and reduce latency for optimized communications," Vucetic adds.