Digital lace:a collision of responsive technologies

Designing with properties such as colour-change and light using electronics and digital control brings new challenges within art and design, and a range of new possibilities for aesthetics, tactility and functionality. Heimtextil 2014 (accessed April 2014) promotes emerging materials and technologies as one of four trends which highlight the increasing demand for unique products utilizing novel material properties and digital making. However, there is still limited insight into the creative potential of these materials that are fundamental to the exploitation of 'smart' material properties, the development of new 'smart' surfaces and digital tools that facilitate designing with colour-change and light-emitting properties specific to textiles. This submission to the Fiber arts category presents new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile which will be presented as an interactive table runner for a digitally manufactured console table. Digital Lace explicitly pools together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Sara Robertson (SR) and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Sarah Taylor (ST). Within the context of 'smart', material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control

Arfid: A Reconfigurable Fabric of Input Devices for the Internet of Things

Abstract Low-cost, easily deployable, reconfigurable, movable input devices can enable adaptive workflows in commercial, industrial, and home environments. A key limitation of previous reconfigurable control systems is their high cost or maintenance burden (e.g., battery changes or wiring setup). Our poster presents Arfid, a "fabric" for reconfigurable input devices that connects low-cost, battery-free inputs to arbitrarily specified functions in their surroundings via a buildingwide network of RFID readers. Users can reassign controllers' functions using a simple web interface

Deep convolutional and LSTM recurrent neural networks for multimodal wearable activity recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) tasks have traditionally been solved using engineered features obtained by heuristic processes. Current research suggests that deep convolutional neural networks are suited to automate feature extraction from raw sensor inputs. However, human activities are made of complex sequences of motor movements, and capturing this temporal dynamics is fundamental for successful HAR. Based on the recent success of recurrent neural networks for time series domains, we propose a generic deep framework for activity recognition based on convolutional and LSTM recurrent units, which: (i) is suitable for multimodal wearable sensors; (ii) can perform sensor fusion naturally; (iii) does not require expert knowledge in designing features; and (iv) explicitly models the temporal dynamics of feature activations. We evaluate our framework on two datasets, one of which has been used in a public activity recognition challenge. Our results show that our framework outperforms competing deep non-recurrent networks on the challenge dataset by 4% on average; outperforming some of the previous reported results by up to 9%. Our results show that the framework can be applied to homogeneous sensor modalities, but can also fuse multimodal sensors to improve performance. We characterise key architectural hyperparameters’ influence on performance to provide insights about their optimisation

Body-Borne Computers as Extensions of Self

The opportunities for wearable technologies go well beyond always-available information displays or health sensing devices. The concept of the cyborg introduced by Clynes and Kline, along with works in various fields of research and the arts, offers a vision of what technology integrated with the body can offer. This paper identifies different categories of research aimed at augmenting humans. The paper specifically focuses on three areas of augmentation of the human body and its sensorimotor capabilities: physical morphology, skin display, and somatosensory extension. We discuss how such digital extensions relate to the malleable nature of our self-image. We argue that body-borne devices are no longer simply functional apparatus, but offer a direct interplay with the mind. Finally, we also showcase some of our own projects in this area and shed light on future challenges

Seven Years after the Manifesto: Literature Review and Research Directions for Technologies in Animal Computer Interaction

As technologies diversify and become embedded in everyday lives, the technologies we expose to animals, and the new technologies being developed for animals within the field of Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) are increasing. As we approach seven years since the ACI manifesto, which grounded the field within Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science, this thematic literature review looks at the technologies developed for (non-human) animals. Technologies that are analysed include tangible and physical, haptic and wearable, olfactory, screen technology and tracking systems. The conversation explores what exactly ACI is whilst questioning what it means to be animal by considering the impact and loop between machine and animal interactivity. The findings of this review are expected to form the first grounding foundation of ACI technologies informing future research in animal computing as well as suggesting future areas for exploratio

Low Energy Physical Activity Recognition System on Smartphones

An innovative approach to physical activity recognition based on the use of discrete variables obtained from accelerometer sensors is presented. The system first performs a discretization process for each variable, which allows efficient recognition of activities performed by users using as little energy as possible. To this end, an innovative discretization and classification technique is presented based on the 2 distribution. Furthermore, the entire recognition process is executed on the smartphone, which determines not only the activity performed, but also the frequency at which it is carried out. These techniques and the new classification system presented reduce energy consumption caused by the activity monitoring system. The energy saved increases smartphone usage time to more than 27 h without recharging while maintaining accuracy.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46801-C4-1-rJunta de Andalucía TIC-805

Move, hold and touch: A framework for Tangible gesture interactive systems

© 2015 by the authors. Technology is spreading in our everyday world, and digital interaction beyond the screen, with real objects, allows taking advantage of our natural manipulative and communicative skills. Tangible gesture interaction takes advantage of these skills by bridging two popular domains in Human-Computer Interaction, tangible interaction and gestural interaction. In this paper, we present the Tangible Gesture Interaction Framework (TGIF) for classifying and guiding works in this field. We propose a classification of gestures according to three relationships with objects: move, hold and touch. Following this classification, we analyzed previous work in the literature to obtain guidelines and common practices for designing and building new tangible gesture interactive systems. We describe four interactive systems as application examples of the TGIF guidelines and we discuss the descriptive, evaluative and generative power of TGIF

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