Synaptics’ Sensa eliminates unintentional thumb touches on your tablet screen

It’s easy to touch the wrong part of a tablet, particularly when the device’s glass goes all the way to the tablet’s edge. So Synaptics, the touch-feedback sensor company, has created a technology called Sensa that deals with that.

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The Sensa technology embeds a touchscreen in the back of a tablet so that it can detect which hand you are using to grip the tablet. Then if your grip hand’s thumb touches the other side of the tablet on the glass, Sensa won’t count that as an intentional thumb touch. That enables you to hold a tablet without making its controls go haywire. You can then tap the screen with your other hand to start intentional commands.

Sensa also does something that is pretty smart. If your thumb is pressed against the glass, it senses that. It then wraps text for an eBook around your thumb so that you can still see the text in question. Sensa is a way that devices with edge-to-edge glass should become more usable.

Synaptics’ Andrew Hsu told us that this proof-of-concept is still very early point in its development, as you can see from the video below. Hsu gave us a demo at the Digital Experience party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and he expects bezels on tablets will shrink more in the future.

Check out our demo from Hsu in the video below.