Finding Common Ground: A Survey of Capacitive Sensing in Human-Computer Interaction

For more than two decades, capacitive sensing has played a prominent role in human-computer interaction research. Capacitive sensing has become ubiquitous on mobile, wearable, and stationary devices---enabling fundamentally new interaction techniques on, above, and around them. The research community has also enabled human position estimation and whole-body gestural interaction in instrumented environments. However, the broad field of capacitive sensing research has become fragmented by different approaches and terminology used across the various domains. This paper strives to unify the field by advocating consistent terminology and proposing a new taxonomy to classify capacitive sensing approaches. Our extensive survey provides an analysis and review of past research and identifies challenges for future work. We aim to create a common understanding within the field of human-computer interaction, for researchers and practitioners alike, and to stimulate and facilitate future research in capacitive sensing

Indoor location identification technologies for real-time IoT-based applications: an inclusive survey

YesThe advent of the Internet of Things has witnessed tremendous success in the application of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing for diverse smart-based applications. The developed systems operate under different technologies using different methods to achieve their targeted goals. In this treatise, we carried out an inclusive survey on key indoor technologies and techniques, with to view to explore their various benefits, limitations, and areas for improvement. The mathematical formulation for simple localization problems is also presented. In addition, an empirical evaluation of the performance of these indoor technologies is carried out using a common generic metric of scalability, accuracy, complexity, robustness, energy-efficiency, cost and reliability. An empirical evaluation of performance of different RF-based technologies establishes the viability of Wi-Fi, RFID, UWB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Light over other indoor technologies for reliable IoT-based applications. Furthermore, the survey advocates hybridization of technologies as an effective approach to achieve reliable IoT-based indoor systems. The findings of the survey could be useful in the selection of appropriate indoor technologies for the development of reliable real-time indoor applications. The study could also be used as a reliable source for literature referencing on the subject of indoor location identification.Supported in part by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund of the Federal Government of Nigeria, and in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016 SECRET-72242

Tangible interaction with anthropomorphic smart objects in instrumented environments

A major technological trend is to augment everyday objects with sensing, computing and actuation power in order to provide new services beyond the objects' traditional purpose, indicating that such smart objects might become an integral part of our daily lives. To be able to interact with smart object systems, users will obviously need appropriate interfaces that regard their distinctive characteristics. Concepts of tangible and anthropomorphic user interfaces are combined in this dissertation to create a novel paradigm for smart object interaction. This work provides an exploration of the design space, introduces design guidelines, and provides a prototyping framework to support the realisation of the proposed interface paradigm. Furthermore, novel methods for expressing personality and emotion by auditory means are introduced and elaborated, constituting essential building blocks for anthropomorphised smart objects. Two experimental user studies are presented, confirming the endeavours to reflect personality attributes through prosody-modelled synthetic speech and to express emotional states through synthesised affect bursts. The dissertation concludes with three example applications, demonstrating the potentials of the concepts and methodologies elaborated in this thesis.Die Integration von Informationstechnologie in Gebrauchsgegenstände ist ein gegenwärtiger technologischer Trend, welcher es Alltagsgegenständen ermöglicht, durch den Einsatz von Sensorik, Aktorik und drahtloser Kommunikation neue Dienste anzubieten, die über den ursprünglichen Zweck des Objekts hinausgehen. Die Nutzung dieser sogenannten Smart Objects erfordert neuartige Benutzerschnittstellen, welche die speziellen Eigenschaften und Anwendungsbereiche solcher Systeme berücksichtigen. Konzepte aus den Bereichen Tangible Interaction und Anthropomorphe Benutzerschnittstellen werden in dieser Dissertation vereint, um ein neues Interaktionsparadigma für Smart Objects zu entwickeln. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht dafür die Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten und zeigt relevante Aspekte aus verwandten Disziplinen auf. Darauf aufbauend werden Richtlinien eingeführt, welche den Entwurf von Benutzerschnittstellen nach dem hier vorgestellten Ansatz begleiten und unterstützen sollen. Für eine prototypische Implementierung solcher Benutzerschnittstellen wird eine Architektur vorgestellt, welche die Anforderungen von Smart Object Systemen in instrumentierten Umgebungen berücksichtigt. Ein wichtiger Bestandteil stellt dabei die Sensorverarbeitung dar, welche unter anderem eine Interaktionserkennung am Objekt und damit auch eine physikalische Eingabe ermöglicht. Des Weiteren werden neuartige Methoden für den auditiven Ausdruck von Emotion und Persönlichkeit entwickelt, welche essentielle Bausteine für anthropomorphisierte Smart Objects darstellen und in Benutzerstudien untersucht wurden. Die Dissertation schliesst mit der Beschreibung von drei Applikationen, welche im Rahmen der Arbeit entwickelt wurden und das Potential der hier erarbeiteten Konzepte und Methoden widerspiegeln

Utilising presence in places to support mobile interaction

Physical places are given contextual meaning by the objects and people that make up the space. Presence in physical places can be utilised to support mobile interaction by making access to media and notifications on a smartphone easier and more visible to other people. Smartphone interfaces can be extended into the physical world in a meaningful way by anchoring digital content to artefacts, and interactions situated around physical artefacts can provide contextual meaning to private manipulations with a mobile device. Additionally, places themselves are designed to support a set of tasks, and the logical structure of places can be used to organise content on the smartphone. Menus that adapt the functionality of a smartphone can support the user by presenting the tools most likely to be needed just-in-time, so that information needs can be satisfied quickly and with little cognitive effort. Furthermore, places are often shared with people whom the user knows, and the smartphone can facilitate social situations by providing access to content that stimulates conversation. However, the smartphone can disrupt a collaborative environment, by alerting the user with unimportant notifications, or sucking the user in to the digital world with attractive content that is only shown on a private screen. Sharing smartphone content on a situated display creates an inclusive and unobtrusive user experience, and can increase focus on a primary task by allowing content to be read at a glance. Mobile interaction situated around artefacts of personal places is investigated as a way to support users to access content from their smartphone while managing their physical presence. A menu that adapts to personal places is evaluated to reduce the time and effort of app navigation, and coordinating smartphone content on a situated display is found to support social engagement and the negotiation of notifications. Improving the sensing of smartphone users in places is a challenge that is out-with the scope of this thesis. Instead, interaction designers and developers should be provided with low-cost positioning tools that utilise presence in places, and enable quantitative and qualitative data to be collected in user evaluations. Two lightweight positioning tools are developed with the low-cost sensors that are currently available: The Microsoft Kinect depth sensor allows movements of a smartphone user to be tracked in a limited area of a place, and Bluetooth beacons enable the larger context of a place to be detected. Positioning experiments with each sensor are performed to highlight the capabilities and limitations of current sensing techniques for designing interactions with a smartphone. Both tools enable prototypes to be built with a rapid prototyping approach, and mobile interactions can be tested with more advanced sensing techniques as they become available. Sensing technologies are becoming pervasive, and it will soon be possible to perform reliable place detection in-the-wild. Novel interactions that utilise presence in places can support smartphone users by making access to useful functionality easy and more visible to the people who matter most in everyday life

PRELIMINARY DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF AN OVERHEAD KITCHEN ROBOT APPLIANCE

Many older adults and individuals with disabilities have difficulty with reaching, grasping, and carrying items that are a necessity to perform independent activities of daily living, including meal preparation in the kitchen. Assistive robotic manipulators are starting to show potential for independent assistance through their use on wheelchairs or mobile bases, but continue to lack many of the autonomous features readily available with fixed environment manipulators. The KitchenBot design described here provides the details and approach to providing an assistive robotic manipulator access to an entire kitchen workspace by utilizing a multi-degree track. Numerous focus groups were conducted in conjunction with the design and major features like heavy payload ability, tablet control interface, and user feedback was extracted. With further development, the KitchenBot could perform an even longer list of routine autonomous tasks in a product viable for everyone to use

Metafore mobilnih komunikacija ; Метафоры мобильной связи.

Mobilne komunikacije su polje informacione i komunikacione tehnologije koje karakteriše brzi razvoj i u kome se istraživanjem u analitičkim okvirima kognitivne lingvistike, zasnovanom na uzorku od 1005 odrednica, otkriva izrazito prisustvo metafore, metonimije, analogije i pojmovnog objedinjavanja. Analiza uzorka reči i izraza iz oblasti mobilnih medija, mobilnih operativnih sistema, dizajna korisničkih interfejsa, terminologije mobilnih mreža, kao i slenga i tekstizama koje upotrebljavaju korisnici mobilnih naprava ukazuje da pomenuti kognitivni mehanizmi imaju ključnu ulogu u olakšavanju interakcije između ljudi i širokog spektra mobilnih uređaja sa računarskim sposobnostima, od prenosivih računara i ličnih digitalnih asistenata (PDA), do mobilnih telefona, tableta i sprava koje se nose na telu. Ti mehanizmi predstavljaju temelj razumevanja i nalaze se u osnovi principa funkcionisanja grafičkih korisničkih interfejsa i direktne manipulacije u računarskim okruženjima. Takođe je analiziran i poseban uzorak od 660 emotikona i emođija koji pokazuju potencijal za proširenje značenja, imajući u vidu značaj piktograma za tekstualnu komunikaciju u vidu SMS poruka i razmenu tekstualnih sadržaja na društvenim mrežama kojima se redovno pristupa putem mobilnih uređaja...Mobile communications are a fast-developing field of information and communication technology whose exploration within the analytical framework of cognitive linguistics, based on a sample of 1005 entries, reveals the pervasive presence of metaphor, metonymy analogy and conceptual integration. The analysis of the sample consisting of words and phrases related to mobile media, mobile operating systems and interface design, the terminology of mobile networking, as well as the slang and textisms employed by mobile gadget users shows that the above cognitive mechanisms play a key role in facilitating interaction between people and a wide range of mobile computing devices from laptops and PDAs to mobile phones, tablets and wearables. They are the cornerstones of comprehension that are behind the principles of functioning of graphical user interfaces and direct manipulation in computing environments. A separate sample, featuring a selection of 660 emoticons and emoji, exhibiting the potential for semantic expansion was also analyzed, in view of the significance of pictograms for text-based communication in the form of text messages or exchanges on social media sites regularly accessed via mobile devices..

Designing the domestic Internet of Things using a practice-orientated perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of sensing, actuating and networked objects, often discussed as delivering efficiency through machine determined, automated decision making and action to achieve ‘Smartness’ in a logistically based paradigm. When applied to the domestic space these values are touted as beneficially controlling lighting, heating and entertainment to improve efficiency and comfort, while reducing costs. This approach follows the external goods of effectiveness, reducing everything to an objective value/cost proposition; however, the home is a subjectively experienced space incorporating differing values, so this reductive perspective overlooks a wider spectrum of inhabitant’s concerns relating to their daily activities and the domestic space. Furthermore, this approach can supplant involvement in domestic activities by treating these as computable problems to solve, alienating users through automation, a lack of transparency and poor understanding of the reasoning behind machine decision making. Existing attempts to address this topic indicate Techno-Centric approaches impact on understanding and engagement with the domestic space; Human-Centric perspectives focus on supporting people’s subjective experiences by prioritising their activities, sense-making and sensory experiences within the design process; Beyond Human-Centric IoT perspectives broaden this understanding to propose non-hierarchical, flat ontologies for the IoT and the implications this has on integrating human/non-human agency in the IoT, generally and domestically. This supported an approach utilising Practice Theory, a development of organising concepts for theorising social life, with sociality dependent on activities conducted with materials to develop a coherent sense of self and which understands place as a meshwork of human/non-human agency. Practice Theory is applied within a Design Research approach using a synergistic Participatory Action Research (PAR) / Participatory Design (PD) process. Exploring Domestic Practices contextualised the IoT through a range of methods including interactive installations, interviews and design workshops, uncovering participant attitudes towards the IoT, generating Practice Themes and specific examples of practices and constituent elements. These acted as User Generated Values (UGV) in a Values-Led PD process to inform the project pathway and the conceptualisation of a Practice-Oriented IoT through PAR’s Action-Reflection spirals. Additionally, a parallel PD process explored the effective communication of UGV within Professional Design Practice (PDP) workshops with the intent of reducing communicative distance between end-users and developers, supporting communication of user’s attitudes towards the IoT and Practice within PDP through inclusion as guiding values. Models of the IoT balancing Practice and technical concerns, workshops and toolkit were developed iteratively, leading to an outcome modelling the IoT and Practice within a flat ontology. Through this, and by embedding Practice within the IoT itself, IoT agency was reframed from automation towards assistiveness in Practice and IoT values shifted from efficiency in external goods of effectiveness towards internally derived goods of excellence, supporting skill development, engagement and reflection on action. This identifies the value of using PAR and PD to consider people’s values, goals and existing practices when developing the domestic IoT. This was particularly valuable in exploring Practice to understand people’s activities in the home and contextualise attitudes towards the IoT. This informed the development of a framework balancing the IoT’s technological nature with people’s activities and values, a system guided by Practice elements reciprocally informing and supporting participant engagement in dynamically developing domestic practices

Rhythm Modelling of Long-Term Activity Data

Long-term monitoring for activity recognition opens up new possibilities for deriving characteristics from the data, such as daily activity rhythms and certain quality measures for the activity performed or for identifying similarities or differences in daily routines. This thesis investigates the detection of activities with wearable sensors and addresses two major challenges in particular: The modelling of a person’s behaviour into rhythmic patterns and the detection of high-level activities, e.g., having lunch or sleeping. To meet these challenges, this thesis makes the following contributions: First, we study different platforms that are suitable for long-term data recording: A wrist-worn sensor and mobile phones. The latter has shown different carrying behaviours for various users. This has to be considered in ubiquitous systems for accurately recognizing the user’s context. We evaluate our findings in a study with a wrist-worn accelerometer by correlating with the inertial data of a smart phone. Second, we investigate datasets that exhibit rhythmic patterns to be used for recognizing high-level activities. Such statistical information obtained over a population is collected with time use surveys which describe how often certain activities are performed by the user. From such datasets we extract features like time and location to describe which activities are detectable by making use of prior information, showing also the benefits and limits of such data. Third, in order to improve on the recognition rates of high-level activities from wearable sensor data only, we propose the use of the aforementioned prior information from time use data. In our approach we investigate the results of a common classifier for several high-level activities, after which we compare them to the outcome of a maximum-likelihood estimation on the time use survey data. In a last step, we show how these two classification approaches are fused to raise the recognition rates. In a fourth contribution we introduce a recording platform to capture sleep and sleep behaviour in the user’s common environment, enabling the unobtrusive monitoring of patterns over several weeks. We use a wrist-worn sensor to record inertial data from which we extract sleep segments. For this purpose, we present three different sleep detection approaches: A Gaussian-, generative model- and stationary segments-based algorithm are evaluated and are found to exhibit different accuracies for detecting sleep. The latter algorithm is pitted against two clinically evaluated sleep detection approaches, indicating that we are able to reach an optimum trade-off between sleep and wake segments, while the two common algorithms tend to overestimate sleep. Further, we investigate the rhythmic patterns within sleep: We classify sleep postures and detect muscle contractions with a high confidence, enabling physicians to efficiently browse through the data

Transmission d'énergie sans fil (Application au réveil à distance de récepteurs en veille zéro consommation)

Les dispositifs électroniques modernes comportent souvent une ou plusieurs phases de veille, dans lesquelles elles attendent un ordre de réveil de la part d un actionneur distant (une télécommande). Ces types de dispositifs ont tendance à être de plus en plus présents dans les habitations et dans les bâtiments tertiaires, en particulier dans le domaine de la domotique. Les phases de veille sont caractérisées par des niveaux de consommations très inférieures aux consommations en mode actif des dispositifs, mais les durées de veille sont généralement grandes devant les périodes actives. Ce fait, combiné à la multiplication des dispositifs, mène à des consommations annuelles qui peuvent dépasser 10 % de la facture d électricité des ménages. Cette étude propose une nouvelle approche de réveil des dispositifs en veille. Au lieu d avoir une écoute permanente en réception et d envoyer une trame d informations de réveil, le récepteur est complètement endormi et est réveillé à travers une impulsion d énergie transmis par d ondes électromagnétiques. Une fois que l étage d interprétation des données est alimenté, un envoi d informations est effectué pour valider l ordre de réveil. En vue des portées attendues pour le système et des contraintes normatives liées aux expositions des personnes aux champs électromagnétiques, une faible quantité d énergie est disponible en réception pour le réveil du dispositif. Plusieurs topologies de circuits de rectification RF-DC (rectenna) en technologies microstrip sont étudiées à travers des simulations circuit et électromagnétiques. La topologie choisie a été optimisée pour fournir un bon niveau de tension DC pour des faibles niveaux de puissance RF incidente. Une adaptation entre le convertisseur et l antenne de réception différente de 50 W a été utilisée. Tous ces résultats ont été validés expérimentalement. Au niveau du circuit de réception des données, plusieurs scénarios de fonctionnement ont été comparés. L étage de démodulation utilise la rectenna comme détecteur à diodes, pour réduire au maximum la consommation et la complexité de mise en œuvre. Le système global a été testé et des gains substantiels sont constatés sur le bilan de consommation annuelle de plusieurs types des dispositifs, comparé à un fonctionnement classique. En parallèle, une architecture de récepteur d énergie électromagnétique reconfigurable est proposée. Il offre l avantage de pouvoir exploiter une large gamme de puissance incidente, ce qui n est pas le cas des structures de rectennas classiques. Des rectennas en technologies discrètes et intégrées sont utilisées, connectées à une antenne commune à travers un switch d antenne intégrée. Le système proposé est adaptatif et les résultats des tests montrent des améliorations notables de la quantité d énergie collectée par rapport à des rectennas individuelles. Enfin, le phénomène de l inversion de la tension dans une association déséquilibrée de rectennas est mis en évidence et des solutions sont proposées.Modern electronic devices often include one or more phases of stand-by, where they waiting for a wakeup order from a distant actuator (remote control). These devices tend to be increasingly present in homes and in commercial buildings, especially in the field of building automation systems. Stand-by periods are characterized by consumption levels well below those in active mode, but stand-by periods are generally large compared to active periods. This fact, combined with the proliferation of devices, leads to annual consumption which may exceed 10% of the annual household electricity bill. This study proposes a new approach to waking up of stand-by devices. Instead of continuous monitoring of the arrival of the wake-up signal, the receiver is completely asleep and woke up through a pulse of energy transmitted via electromagnetic waves. Once the data receiver module is activated, information is sent to validate the wake-up order. In view of the expected ranges for the system and normative constraints related to exposures to electromagnetic fields, only a small amount of energy is available at receiver level for performing the wake-up. Several RF-DC rectification circuit (rectenna) topologies in microstrip technology are studied through circuit and electromagnetic simulation. The chosen topology has been optimized to provide a good level of DC voltage at low levels of incident RF power. A matching impedance other than 50 W between the converter and the receiving antenna was used. All these results have been validated experimentally. For the data receiver circuit, several operating scenarios were compared. The demodulation stage uses the rectenna as a diode detector to minimize consumption and complexity of implementation. The overall system has been tested and substantial gains are obtained for several types of devices, in terms of annual consumption, compared to classical stand-by devices. At the same time, a reconfigurable electromagnetic energy receiver architecture is proposed. It offers the advantage of exploiting a wide range of incident power, which is not the case of conventional rectenna structures. Rectennas fabricated in discrete and integrated technology are used, connected to a common antenna through an integrated antenna switch. The proposed system is self-adaptive and the test results show significant improvements in the amount of energy collected compared to individual rectennas. Finally, the phenomenon of voltage reversal in unbalanced rectenna associations is highlighted and possible solutions are proposed.LYON-Ecole Centrale (690812301) / SudocSudocFranceF

Snap, pan, zoom, click, grab, and the embodied archive of geographic information systems

The aim of this thesis is to critically interrogate the question of ‘what is’ Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from an arts and humanities perspective, and to contribute to the emergence of what scholars have called a ‘third stage’, or ‘creative’ GIS. A significant element of this thesis is a practice-based research component that allowed for unpredictable avenues to emerge as the research unfolded, and the cultivation of an experimental approach that ‘tinkered’ with objects of inquiry regardless of preconceived outcomes. I begin with a critical assessment of the conceptual heritage of GIS, and related debates that situate GIS in the context of digital technologies and objects, structuralist, humanist and post-humanist geographic literatures on practice, and creativity as a productive geographic practice, before offering the notion of the ‘archive’ as a productive means of framing and interrogating GIS. In order to understand the doing of GIS, field studies were conducted to investigate what it means to learn and become immersed in GIS. I deployed more established social science methods at several sites, such as interviewing and participant observation, supplemented with auto-ethnographic accounts. From here, I sought to investigate how my own creative practice brought something new to the study of GIS, working through an abundance of materials, insights, and feelings amassed over the course of the PhD. Several artworks were created to tease-out, distil, and probe the aesthetic qualities of GIS that had become known to me throughout the PhD. This was a matter of ‘interfacing’, between GIS as broad discipline and my creative and aesthetic sensibilities and determining how my singular approach could recast our understanding of what GIS indeed is. This thesis renders GIS not only as a tool, as a means of producing geographic knowledge according ontologies past and present, but as a set of practices that the user takes part in, and asserts his or her agency, but also must surrender themselves (at least in part) to the agency manifest through GIS as a historically, socially, and technologically produced mechanism. The practices involved in GIS are not just productive to particular ends, such as map making. The emotional dispositions, frustrations, anxieties, affective atmospheres of GIS practice produce a material and embodied residue that must be taken into consideration when we consider what GIS is. The thesis thus concludes with a proposal for a curated exhibition to ‘open up’ the dissemination of the thesis beyond the page and provide some sense of the what of GIS via other mediums. This curated installation offers a moment of closure for the project, as a culmination, a coming together of many of the materials built up and collected during the project