Why did this artifact come to exist? It received inspiration from in many areas.

(Bill and Melinda Gates Fnd.) Designing a Better Condom Challenge

Last year, the Gates foundation had a competition to design a better, more pleasurable condom. The goal was to make these sexual devices more desirable and easier to use so that more people would actively seek to use them and help curb the spread of terrible diseases like AIDS. The competition ended last year and, despite what people on the internet may think, this project received no money for it, just inspiration for a good idea.

Looking through the many brilliant designs submitted aimed at enhancing pleasure, or ease of use, most of the products targeted structural changes in how the condoms are packaged or used. My excellent training at Georgia Tech pushed me to instead try to think of a way that digital changes can be brought to the world of condoms. Certain condoms in the past have tried to augment the experience with electro-mechanical stimulation through a vibrating ring that could be sold with them. Instead I wanted something that could be potentially more refined, and programmable, and hence responsive. Electro-mechanics have served this industry well, but in something intended to be thin, cheap, and disposable, I needed a different way to transmit programmable stimulation to the users. This got me thinking about…

(Wired Article / Responsive Environments Group) Spatialized Electrical Sensing on Tongue / Tongueduino

With my research about designing new interactions with environments and animals I am always trying to check out new ways to feed information into humans. (In fact, this week I am going to a workshop in Singapore about designing augmented sensory devices at NUS).

A while ago, back in 2007, Wired published an article about this topic and was discussing using the tongue as a high-resolution spatialized sensory device for “seeing” (They had a pretty sweet graphic with an eyeball on a tongue).

Since then, Gershon Dublon and Joseph A. Paradiso, made a simple version of a spatialized tongue stimulator using a vinyl cutter, which he called a tongueduino. When I built the "Electric Eel, I did not have access to a vinyl cutter, or many other tools, and so I wanted to see how possible it would be to just sew one together out of conductive threads and fabrics. (I’ll actually post a simple little instructable about this later, it’s easy and fun!). Once I was able to prove this could work on a tongue, I wanted to see if there were any other parts of your body that would be able to feel these sensations. Since I had just recently started my own DIY Sex-toy company (see below), you can guess the body parts that I wanted to try out.

Turned out that worked too (though you have much less sensitivity in these regions than your tongue, and a higher voltage was necessary to achieve the same experience as your tongue). From there, it became a matter of how to design such a prototype to see what would be desirable in a mass-produced product (like the digital condom), or even in just how to build a self-stimulation device.

(Comingle.io) Putting people in charge of their own sexual technology

This is a new business started by a fellow PhD student, Paul Clifton, and myself. Our loftiest goal is to eventually be like an Adafruit of Sexual technology. The business holds three primary goals:

-Innovating new means of stimulation (e.g. beyond the this-thing-just-vibrates-and-that-feels-nice, methodology)

-Developing new embodied and collaborative interfaces (e.g. beyond this-controller-switches-to-three-modes-of-vibration-intensity).

-Enabling others to create their own customized sexual technological experiences (e.g. by providing the information and parts to build your own devices or hack existing ones)

Developing this business inspired me to think of a device that could not only be fun to use, but potentially engineered to prevent disease as well.

The rest of this instructable will show you how to build the “Electric Eel” prototype you see in the video. This is primarily intended for use with male body-parts. The shape of this device could be easily modified for use with other sensitive body parts of other sexes too. Just use your imagination!