Topic 171

Types of input/output peripherals used in various situations, for example, arms, fingers, voice, wheels by Kent

Along with the development of technology, many input and output peripherals has developed. The most common and basic ones in most things are finger inputs such as keyboards or switches and visual output. However, there are many more kinds of input and output peripherals that have been invented.

The input peripherals of fingers or arms includes keyboard, pointing device such as mouse and trackball, and joystick that could often be found in game controllers. Touch screen is also an example of those. A rather new finger input peripheral would be wheels. It could be found of i-pods.

While those finger and arm input peripherals are the most common ones, there are many other input peripherals. There also are voice input peripherals which would be a microphone. Two dimensional images on papers could be inputted by scanners as well as three dimensional image by camera or webcom in which case it would not be a mere image but a series of image, movie. Other input peripherals would be barcode readers. Like a scanner, it consists of light source and reads off barcode written on a surface. It works the same for cell phones to read off QR codes. Similar technology is used to read some card (for example a train pass) that can be read by certain peripheral.

Another unusual input peripheral would be the brain computer interface. It is the technology to connect the brain and computer by certain electrodes pieced into the brain that reads any nerve pulses. It was successful to use a computer without any mouse but only by brain pulses. There also is a mechanical arm connected to implanted electrodes in the brain that moves the way you would move your fresh arm.

The output peripherals are mainly divided into printing, sound and visual. First of all, printing output peripherals includes obviously printer. Secondly, sound output peripherals would be speakers. Thirdly, visual peripherals include the display monitor. It is apparent that there are less output peripherals than input peripherals. However, the brain computer interface comprise not only of inputs from the brain but also outputs to the brain.

The brain computer interface can send certain electric pulse into the brain. For example, there are bionic eyes that transform the image data from eye-like cameras into nerve pulses and sends it to the brain through the implanted electrodes. This allows blind people to see images, and since these images are from a camera it is much clearer than fresh eyes. The same works for cochlear implant which is for the ears. The mechanical arms can also send back the sense of touch and heat to the brain. Thus, brain computer interface allows to output certain senses directly into the brain. This brain computer interface would probably be common in a few years or a decade.

In conclusion, input and output peripheralsis the most important aspect of technology because it is how we humans communicate with the technology. Any technology is obviously useless without it. Your calculator is useless if it did do the calculation but did not output the answer to you. Thus, it would inevitably develop together with the inside part of technology.