Touchscreen Monitor

Touchscreen monitor is display overlays which has the ability to display and receive information on the same screen. The effect of such overlays allows a display to be used as an input device, removing the keyboard and the mouse as the primary input device for interacting with the display's content. Such displays can be attached to computers or, as terminals, to networks. Touchscreen monitor also has assisted in recent changes in the PDA and Cell-Phone Industries, making these devices more useable.

Touchscreen monitor has become commonplace since the invention of the electronic touch interface in 1971 by Dr. Samuel C. Hurst. It has become familiar in retail settings, on point of sale systems, on ATMs and on PDAs where a stylus is sometimes used to manipulate the GUI and to enter data. The popularity of smart phones, PDAs, portable game consoles and many types of information appliances is driving the demand for, and the acceptance of, touchscreen monitors. The HP-150 from 1983 was probably the world's earliest commercial computer featuring a touchscreen monitor. It actually did not have a touchscreen monitor in the strict sense, but a 9" Sony CRT surrounded by infrared transmitters and receivers which detect the position of any non-transparent object on the screen.

Historically, the touchscreen sensor and its accompanying controller-based firmware have been made available by a wide array of after-market system integrators and not by display, chip or motherboard manufacturers. With time, however, display manufacturers and System On Chip (SOC) manufacturers worldwide have acknowledged the trend toward acceptance of touchscreen monitor as a highly desirable user interface component and have begun to integrate touchscreen functionality into the fundamental design of their products.

Touchscreen monitor is very popular in heavy industry and in other situations, such as museum displays or room automation, where keyboards and mice do not allow a satisfactory, intuitive, rapid, or accurate interaction by the user with the display's content.

There are a number of types of touch screen technology that include resistive; surface wave; capacitive; infrared; strain gauge; optical imaging; Dispersive Signal Technology (DST) and acoustic pulse recognition.

An ergonomic problem of touchscreen monitor is the stress on human fingers when used for more than a few minutes at a time, since significant pressure is required and the screen is non-flexible. The resulting condition is labeled "gorilla arm" because it makes the user feel clumsy.

With the growing acceptance of many kinds of products with an integral touchscreen monitor interface the marginal cost of touchscreen technology is routinely absorbed into the products that incorporate it and is effectively eliminated. As typically occurs with any technology, touchscreen hardware and software has sufficiently matured and been perfected over more than three decades to the point where its reliability is unassailable. As such, touchscreen displays are found today in airplanes, automobiles, gaming consoles, machine control systems, appliances and handheld display devices of every kind.