GART: The Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolkit

Presented at the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Beijing, China, July 2007.The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comThe Gesture and Activity Recognition Toolit (GART) is a user interface toolkit designed to enable the development of gesture-based applications. GART provides an abstraction to machine learning algorithms suitable for modeling and recognizing different types of gestures. The toolkit also provides support for the data collection and the training process. In this paper, we present GART and its machine learning abstractions. Furthermore, we detail the components of the toolkit and present two example gesture recognition applications

dWatch: a Personal Wrist Watch for Smart Environments

Intelligent environments, such as smart homes or domotic systems, have the potential to support people in many of their ordinary activities, by allowing complex control strategies for managing various capabilities of a house or a building: lights, doors, temperature, power and energy, music, etc. Such environments, typically, provide these control strategies by means of computers, touch screen panels, mobile phones, tablets, or In-House Displays. An unobtrusive and typically wearable device, like a bracelet or a wrist watch, that lets users perform various operations in their homes and to receive notifications from the environment, could strenghten the interaction with such systems, in particular for those people not accustomed to computer systems (e.g., elderly) or in contexts where they are not in front of a screen. Moreover, such wearable devices reduce the technological gap introduced in the environment by home automation systems, thus permitting a higher level of acceptance in the daily activities and improving the interaction between the environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we introduce the dWatch, an off-the-shelf personal wearable notification and control device, integrated in an intelligent platform for domotic systems, designed to optimize the way people use the environment, and built as a wrist watch so that it is easily accessible, worn by people on a regular basis and unobtrusiv