Touchwaves

Four ways to detect a drone — and the limits of each. The drone-detection market is rapidly growing, and the core technology is now well established. Radar, RF, acoustic and EO/IR sensors are increasingly fused into a single operating picture, improving the ability to detect threats early. Each sensor detects a drone through one physical signature — a radio link, a radar return, a sound, or a heat trace. As a result, each has specific conditions under which it performs well and others where its effectiveness drops. No single method covers every scenario, which is why layered, multi-sensor systems have become the standard approach. Detection is only the first step: a track still has to reach a human operator who can act on it in time. Here's how each sensor works, and where each has limits ↓ #DroneDetection #CounterUAS #SituationalAwareness #Defence #Haptics

Above the Neck vs. Below the Neck For decades, avionics has refined two channels, vision and hearing, and both now terminate above the neck, fully saturated. In one controlled study, 39.3% of pilots failed to register a critical auditory alarm. You cannot fix a saturated channel by adding to it. A brighter light on an overloaded visual system is just more competition. So we looked below the neck, at the one communication surface left unused: Touch. The body runs on an independent neural pathway that does not queue behind sight or sound. A vibration signals a threat before a display can be read. This isn't about adding haptics. It's redistribution: returning the one resource that can't be manufactured > operator attention. The signals were never the problem. The body has been available all along. It's time we gave it a language. 🧡 #HumanFactors #DefenseInnovation #Haptics

💡A valuable day for Touchwaves’ Team! Last week, our team visited the Holst Centre, the open-innovation R&D hub powered by imec.istart and TNO. For us, this was more than a visit — Holst Centre is where our story began. As a TNO spin-off, our roots trace directly back to this ecosystem, making it something of a home base and a place we're proud to stay connected to. The visit was also an insightful look at the many applications of sensors in healthcare, and a reminder of the strength of the deep-tech environment we're part of. To make the week even more meaningful, we welcomed our newest team members — a great group of people joining us as we continue to grow! #Touchwaves #DeepTech #HolstCentre #Innovation

Touchwaves is strengthening its market position in haptics for dual-use applications. Over the next 18 months, we will be developing the technologies behind our interactive wearables, building toward robust functionality and scalability for large markets. Our thanks to the Provincie Noord-Brabant for funding this initiative, and to Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM) for bringing the companies and knowledge partners together across the Brabant ecosystem. We are proud to build alongside our research partners TNO and the Holst Centre, our industry partner TracXon, and fellow innovators Bilihome and 2M ENGINEERING. This is how a region moves locally, developing deep-tech toward commercial products for international markets. 🇳🇱 #Haptics #DualUse #MedTech #Brainport #DeepTech

🇬🇧📅Touchwaves is heading to Farnborough International Airshow! On 21st and 22nd July, we join the global aerospace, defence and space industry at Farnborough. If you're working on pilot performance, human-system integration, or the future cockpit, let's connect in Farnborough. #FIA2026 #Aerospace #Touchwaves

If you are wondering what the future of human performance looks like, this is #Touchwaves' answer: Aircraft capability is scaling exponentially. Human cognitive capacity is not. That gap is where missions, and lives, are lost. For decades we have tried to close it by adding to the two channels already carrying the entire flight task: -more visual alerts, -more audio warnings. But technology that demands attention has failed before it starts. At Touchwaves, we work on the part of the system everyone else treats as fixed: the human. Our channel is a third, underused one. Touch reaches the brain through a pathway that flying does not already occupy — direct, fast, and until now largely unused. The cockpit of the future will not have more screens. It will have a pilot who can still process the mission.

🇫🇷Two days in Paris at the EU Defence and Security (EUDIS) Bootcamp — and a sharper picture of where European defence innovation is heading. The agenda last week centred on the French strategic vision, and put deep-tech founders in the same room as the people who actually shape defence: the French military, the industrial primes, and the investors backing dual-use technology. These are the conversations that move things forward: direct exchanges with the people building and backing European defence, where ideas get pressure-tested and real connections get made. Grateful for the conversations, the introductions, and the perspective. #EUDIS #Touchwaves

Air defence asks operators to make life-or-death decisions in seconds — against targets that are fast, ambiguous, and built to deceive, on information that is never complete. Two forces explain why this stays hard, even as sensors and weapons advance: fog and friction. Fog is the gap between what's happening in the airspace and what an operator can know with confidence: sensor ambiguity, identification uncertainty, and the cognitive saturation of too many feeds on a single screen. Friction is the resistance between a correct decision and a completed action — dropped data links, engagement authority, interceptors that miss, accumulated fatigue. The instinct is to add more sensors and louder alarms. But a saturated visual channel can't be fixed with more visuals. The decisive constraint in modern air defence isn't technology. It's human capacity — and that's the bottleneck Touchwaves is built to close, through touch.

💡Touchwaves Is Partnering with GA-ASI to Bring Wearable Haptic Technology to Drone Operators Every aircraft built in the last decade speaks to its operator through two channels: sight and sound. Both are full. Today, we're opening a third. Touchwaves has been selected as one of six companies by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the world's foremost builder of Unmanned Aircraft Systems, to bring tactile awareness to the operators who fly them. A #UAS operator on a long-duration mission tracks flight path, sensors, datalink, airspace, and radio at once. Past a certain point, those channels saturate, and alerts slip through unheard. Touchwaves found another way in: the skin. Our textile-integrated wearables turn critical data into precise tactile cues felt on the body, opening a third channel that stays open when the others are maxed out. Through this partnership, GA-ASI will evaluate our haptic technology for use in remotely piloted #MQ9 environments, assessing the potential for long-duration missions and aircrew information overload. The machine is not the bottleneck anymore: the human is, and that’s what this partnership is built to close. The oldest sense may be the newest edge.

Vestibular Illusions: When the #Brain Betrays the Cockpit One-third of fatal aviation mishaps come down to a sensor the pilot can't recalibrate, can't switch off, and can't fully trust: their own inner ear. It's the vestibular system, fluid-filled canals that sense motion and gravity. Built for walking, not for sustained acceleration at altitude. In degraded conditions — cloud, night, brownout — the brain defaults to bodily sensation over instrument readings. The graveyard spiral is the classic case: a gentle descending turn that feels exactly like straight-and-level flight. Overriding that illusion costs continuous cognitive effort, draining the very resources a pilot needs to fly. Situational #awareness isn't what a pilot sees. It's what their brain understands. The hard limit is that training builds reflexes, but does not expand working memory or switch off a false signal from the inner ear. So the real question is: are training systems preparing pilots for the neuroscience of flight, or just its mechanics? #cognitiveoverload #haptics