Multidimensional Capacitive Sensing for Robot-Assisted Dressing and Bathing

Robotic assistance presents an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with physical disabilities, yet accurately sensing the human body and tracking human motion remain difficult for robots. We present a multidimensional capacitive sensing technique that estimates the local pose of a human limb in real time. A key benefit of this sensing method is that it can sense the limb through opaque materials, including fabrics and wet cloth. Our method uses a multielectrode capacitive sensor mounted to a robot's end effector. A neural network model estimates the position of the closest point on a person's limb and the orientation of the limb's central axis relative to the sensor's frame of reference. These pose estimates enable the robot to move its end effector with respect to the limb using feedback control. We demonstrate that a PR2 robot can use this approach with a custom six electrode capacitive sensor to assist with two activities of daily living-dressing and bathing. The robot pulled the sleeve of a hospital gown onto able-bodied participants' right arms, while tracking human motion. When assisting with bathing, the robot moved a soft wet washcloth to follow the contours of able-bodied participants' limbs, cleaning their surfaces. Overall, we found that multidimensional capacitive sensing presents a promising approach for robots to sense and track the human body during assistive tasks that require physical human-robot interaction.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figures, International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics 201

EdgeGlass: Exploring Tapping Performance on Smart Glasses while Sitting and Walking

Department of Human Factors EngineeringCurrently, smart glasses allow only touch sensing area which supports front mounted touch pads. However, touches on top, front and bottom sides of glass mounted touchpad is not yet explored. We made a customized touch sensor (length: 5-6 cm, height: 1 cm, width: 0.5 cm) featuring the sensing on its top, front, and bottom surfaces. For doing that, we have used capacitive touch sensing technology (MPR121 chips) with an electrode size of ~4.5 mm square, which is typical in the modern touchscreens. We have created a hardware system which consists of a total of 48 separate touch sensors. We investigated the interaction technique by it for both the sitting and walking situation, using a single finger sequential tapping and a pair finger simultaneous tapping. We have divided each side into three equal target areas and this separation made a total of 36 combinations. Our quantitative result showed that pair finger simultaneous tapping touches were faster, less error-prone in walking condition, compared to single finger sequential tapping into walking condition. Whereas, single finger sequence tapping touches were slower, but less error-prone in sitting condition, compared to pair simultaneous tapping in sitting condition. However, single finger sequential tapping touches were slower, much less error-prone in sitting condition compared to walking. Interestingly, double finger tapping touches had similar performance result in terms of both, error rate and completion time, in both sitting and walking conditions. Mental, physical, performance, effort did not have any effect on any temporal tapping???s and body poses experience of workload. In case of the parameter of temporal demand, for single finger sequential tapping mean temporal (time pressure) workload demand was higher than pair finger simultaneous tapping but body poses did not affect temporal (time pressure) workload for both of the sequential and simultaneous tapping type. In case of the parameter of frustration, the result suggested that mean frustration workload was higher for single finger sequential tapping experienced by the participants compared to pair finger simultaneous tapping and among body poses, walking experienced higher frustration mean workload than sitting. The subjective measure of overall workload during the performance study showed no significant difference between both independent variable: body pose (sitting and walking) and temporal tapping (single finger sequential tapping and pair finger simultaneous tapping).ope

Toward New Ecologies of Cyberphysical Representational Forms, Scales, and Modalities

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with screen-based multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established mainstream interaction paradigms. This dissertation describes interfaces that support complementary information mediations, representational forms, and scales toward an ecology of systems embodying hybrid interaction modalities. I investigate systems combining tangible and multi-touch, as well as systems combining tangible and virtual reality interaction. For each of them, I describe work focusing on design and fabrication aspects, as well as work focusing on reproducibility, engagement, legibility, and perception aspects

Exploring human-object interaction through force vector measurement

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-107).I introduce SCALE, a project aiming to further understand Human-Object Interaction through the real-time analysis of force vector signals, which I have defined as "Force-based Interaction" in this thesis. Force conveys fundamental information in Force-based Interaction, including force intensity, its direction, and object weight - information otherwise difficult to be accessed or inferred from other sensing modalities. To explore the design space of force-based interaction, I have developed the SCALE toolkit, which is composed of modularized 3d-axis force sensors and application APIs. In collaboration with big industry companies, this system has been applied to a variety of application domains and settings, including a retail store, a smart home and a farmers market. In this thesis, I have proposed a base system SCALE, and two additional advanced projects titled KI/OSK and DepthTouch, which build upon the SCALE project.by Takatoshi Yoshida.S.M.S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Science

Body-Area Capacitive or Electric Field Sensing for Human Activity Recognition and Human-Computer Interaction: A Comprehensive Survey

Due to the fact that roughly sixty percent of the human body is essentially composed of water, the human body is inherently a conductive object, being able to, firstly, form an inherent electric field from the body to the surroundings and secondly, deform the distribution of an existing electric field near the body. Body-area capacitive sensing, also called body-area electric field sensing, is becoming a promising alternative for wearable devices to accomplish certain tasks in human activity recognition and human-computer interaction. Over the last decade, researchers have explored plentiful novel sensing systems backed by the body-area electric field. On the other hand, despite the pervasive exploration of the body-area electric field, a comprehensive survey does not exist for an enlightening guideline. Moreover, the various hardware implementations, applied algorithms, and targeted applications result in a challenging task to achieve a systematic overview of the subject. This paper aims to fill in the gap by comprehensively summarizing the existing works on body-area capacitive sensing so that researchers can have a better view of the current exploration status. To this end, we first sorted the explorations into three domains according to the involved body forms: body-part electric field, whole-body electric field, and body-to-body electric field, and enumerated the state-of-art works in the domains with a detailed survey of the backed sensing tricks and targeted applications. We then summarized the three types of sensing frontends in circuit design, which is the most critical part in body-area capacitive sensing, and analyzed the data processing pipeline categorized into three kinds of approaches. Finally, we described the challenges and outlooks of body-area electric sensing

Digital Fabrication Approaches for the Design and Development of Shape-Changing Displays

Interactive shape-changing displays enable dynamic representations of data and information through physically reconfigurable geometry. The actuated physical deformations of these displays can be utilised in a wide range of new application areas, such as dynamic landscape and topographical modelling, architectural design, physical telepresence and object manipulation. Traditionally, shape-changing displays have a high development cost in mechanical complexity, technical skills and time/finances required for fabrication. There is still a limited number of robust shape-changing displays that go beyond one-off prototypes. Specifically, there is limited focus on low-cost/accessible design and development approaches involving digital fabrication (e.g. 3D printing). To address this challenge, this thesis presents accessible digital fabrication approaches that support the development of shape-changing displays with a range of application examples – such as physical terrain modelling and interior design artefacts. Both laser cutting and 3D printing methods have been explored to ensure generalisability and accessibility for a range of potential users. The first design-led content generation explorations show that novice users, from the general public, can successfully design and present their own application ideas using the physical animation features of the display. By engaging with domain experts in designing shape-changing content to represent data specific to their work domains the thesis was able to demonstrate the utility of shape-changing displays beyond novel systems and describe practical use-case scenarios and applications through rapid prototyping methods. This thesis then demonstrates new ways of designing and building shape-changing displays that goes beyond current implementation examples available (e.g. pin arrays and continuous surface shape-changing displays). To achieve this, the thesis demonstrates how laser cutting and 3D printing can be utilised to rapidly fabricate deformable surfaces for shape-changing displays with embedded electronics. This thesis is concluded with a discussion of research implications and future direction for this work