I think this is a fascinating question and I don't honestly have an answer to it. There is a lot of interest in the broader HCI community around wearable tech, embodied tech, and ubiquitous computing. Naturally Google - a major employer of HCI researchers - has a lot of people who are into this sort of thing. But that just pushes the answer back to why is the HCI community so into this? My best guess is that the HCI research does not really have a central canon or paradigm (a lot of people come from other departments (CS, Psychology, ...)). Consequently the community is very open minded about what constitutes valid research and creative expression and potential valued more than practicality.

I've spent some time in the HCI community, even going to a SIGCHI once, and my take is that input methods are a very wide open field. So it's easy to get work here.

Some of it can be downright sexy, and giving good demo gets you more prestige and money. I'm sure GATAP is no different.

What puzzles me is that we're certainly headed down new roads that other groups have paved already, like two-way audio interfaces and AR/VR. Tactile is great, but also presents a huge gap in affordances. Any interface you need to train for is a failed one. Anyone with an AirPod and Siri has moved a generation past a clickable headphone button. So why keep pursuing a one-dimensional interface method like a hoodie string?

I get that there's an application here in decoding waveforms using "AI" to translate signals to gestures. And maybe that's the point.

It's a pretty obvious potential next step for wearable gadgets and a bunch of specialty applications.