Haptics Rendering and Applications

There has been significant progress in haptic technologies but the incorporation of haptics into virtual environments is still in its infancy. A wide range of the new society's human activities including communication, education, art, entertainment, commerce and science would forever change if we learned how to capture, manipulate and reproduce haptic sensory stimuli that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. For the field to move forward, many commercial and technological barriers need to be overcome. By rendering how objects feel through haptic technology, we communicate information that might reflect a desire to speak a physically- based language that has never been explored before. Due to constant improvement in haptics technology and increasing levels of research into and development of haptics-related algorithms, protocols and devices, there is a belief that haptics technology has a promising future

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information

Intracardiac Ultrasound Guided Systems for Transcatheter Cardiac Interventions

Transcatheter cardiac interventions are characterized by their percutaneous nature, increased patient safety, and low hospitalization times. Transcatheter procedures involve two major stages: navigation towards the target site and the positioning of tools to deliver the therapy, during which the interventionalists face the challenge of visualizing the anatomy and the relative position of the tools such as a guidewire. Fluoroscopic and transesophageal ultrasound (TEE) imaging are the most used techniques in cardiac procedures; however, they possess the disadvantage of radiation exposure and suboptimal imaging. This work explores the potential of intracardiac ultrasound (ICE) within an image guidance system (IGS) to facilitate the two stages of cardiac interventions. First, a novel 2.5D side-firing, conical Foresight ICE probe (Conavi Medical Inc., Toronto) is characterized, calibrated, and tracked using an electromagnetic sensor. The results indicate an acceptable tracking accuracy within some limitations. Next, an IGS is developed for navigating the vessels without fluoroscopy. A forward-looking, tracked ICE probe is used to reconstruct the vessel on a phantom which mimics the ultrasound imaging of an animal vena cava. Deep learning methods are employed to segment the complex vessel geometry from ICE imaging for the first time. The ICE-reconstructed vessel showed a clinically acceptable range of accuracy. Finally, a guidance system was developed to facilitate the positioning of tools during a tricuspid valve repair. The designed system potentially facilitates the positioning of the TriClip at the coaptation gap by pre-mapping the corresponding site of regurgitation in 3D tracking space

WearPut : Designing Dexterous Wearable Input based on the Characteristics of Human Finger Motions

Department of Biomedical Engineering (Human Factors Engineering)Powerful microchips for computing and networking allow a wide range of wearable devices to be miniaturized with high fidelity and availability. In particular, the commercially successful smartwatches placed on the wrist drive market growth by sharing the role of smartphones and health management. The emerging Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) also impact various application areas in video games, education, simulation, and productivity tools. However, these powerful wearables have challenges in interaction with the inevitably limited space for input and output due to the specialized form factors for fitting the body parts. To complement the constrained interaction experience, many wearable devices still rely on other large form factor devices (e.g., smartphones or hand-held controllers). Despite their usefulness, the additional devices for interaction can constrain the viability of wearable devices in many usage scenarios by tethering users' hands to the physical devices. This thesis argues that developing novel Human-Computer interaction techniques for the specialized wearable form factors is vital for wearables to be reliable standalone products. This thesis seeks to address the issue of constrained interaction experience with novel interaction techniques by exploring finger motions during input for the specialized form factors of wearable devices. The several characteristics of the finger input motions are promising to enable increases in the expressiveness of input on the physically limited input space of wearable devices. First, the input techniques with fingers are prevalent on many large form factor devices (e.g., touchscreen or physical keyboard) due to fast and accurate performance and high familiarity. Second, many commercial wearable products provide built-in sensors (e.g., touchscreen or hand tracking system) to detect finger motions. This enables the implementation of novel interaction systems without any additional sensors or devices. Third, the specialized form factors of wearable devices can create unique input contexts while the fingers approach their locations, shapes, and components. Finally, the dexterity of fingers with a distinctive appearance, high degrees of freedom, and high sensitivity of joint angle perception have the potential to widen the range of input available with various movement features on the surface and in the air. Accordingly, the general claim of this thesis is that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. This thesis demonstrates the general claim by providing evidence in various wearable scenarios with smartwatches and HMDs. First, this thesis explored the comfort range of static and dynamic touch input with angles on the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results showed the specific comfort ranges on variations in fingers, finger regions, and poses due to the unique input context that the touching hand approaches a small and fixed touchscreen with a limited range of angles. Then, finger region-aware systems that recognize the flat and side of the finger were constructed based on the contact areas on the touchscreen to enhance the expressiveness of angle-based touch input. In the second scenario, this thesis revealed distinctive touch profiles of different fingers caused by the unique input context for the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results led to the implementation of finger identification systems for distinguishing two or three fingers. Two virtual keyboards with 12 and 16 keys showed the feasibility of touch-based finger identification that enables increases in the expressiveness of touch input techniques. In addition, this thesis supports the general claim with a range of wearable scenarios by exploring the finger input motions in the air. In the third scenario, this thesis investigated the motions of in-air finger stroking during unconstrained in-air typing for HMDs. The results of the observation study revealed details of in-air finger motions during fast sequential input, such as strategies, kinematics, correlated movements, inter-fingerstroke relationship, and individual in-air keys. The in-depth analysis led to a practical guideline for developing robust in-air typing systems with finger stroking. Lastly, this thesis examined the viable locations of in-air thumb touch input to the virtual targets above the palm. It was confirmed that fast and accurate sequential thumb touch can be achieved at a total of 8 key locations with the built-in hand tracking system in a commercial HMD. Final typing studies with a novel in-air thumb typing system verified increases in the expressiveness of virtual target selection on HMDs. This thesis argues that the objective and subjective results and novel interaction techniques in various wearable scenarios support the general claim that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. Finally, this thesis concludes with thesis contributions, design considerations, and the scope of future research works, for future researchers and developers to implement robust finger-based interaction systems on various types of wearable devices.ope

Augmented Reality Assistance for Surgical Interventions using Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays

Augmented Reality (AR) offers an interactive user experience via enhancing the real world environment with computer-generated visual cues and other perceptual information. It has been applied to different applications, e.g. manufacturing, entertainment and healthcare, through different AR media. An Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display (OST-HMD) is a specialized hardware for AR, where the computer-generated graphics can be overlaid directly onto the user's normal vision via optical combiners. Using OST-HMD for surgical intervention has many potential perceptual advantages. As a novel concept, many technical and clinical challenges exist for OST-HMD-based AR to be clinically useful, which motivates the work presented in this thesis. From the technical aspects, we first investigate the display calibration of OST-HMD, which is an indispensable procedure to create accurate AR overlay. We propose various methods to reduce the user-related error, improve robustness of the calibration, and remodel the calibration as a 3D-3D registration problem. Secondly, we devise methods and develop hardware prototype to increase the user's visual acuity of both real and virtual content through OST-HMD, to aid them in tasks that require high visual acuity, e.g. dental procedures. Thirdly, we investigate the occlusion caused by the OST-HMD hardware, which limits the user's peripheral vision. We propose to use alternative indicators to remind the user of unattended environment motion. From the clinical perspective, we identified many clinical use cases where OST-HMD-based AR is potentially helpful, developed applications integrated with current clinical systems, and conducted proof-of-concept evaluations. We first present a "virtual monitor'' for image-guided surgery. It can replace real radiology monitors in the operating room with easier user control and more flexibility in positioning. We evaluated the "virtual monitor'' for simulated percutaneous spine procedures. Secondly, we developed ARssist, an application for the bedside assistant in robotic surgery. The assistant can see the robotic instruments and endoscope within the patient body with ARssist. We evaluated the efficiency, safety and ergonomics of the assistant during two typical tasks: instrument insertion and manipulation. The performance for inexperienced users is significantly improved with ARssist, and for experienced users, the system significantly enhanced their confidence level. Lastly, we developed ARAMIS, which utilizes real-time 3D reconstruction and visualization to aid the laparoscopic surgeon. It demonstrates the concept of "X-ray see-through'' surgery. Our preliminary evaluation validated the application via a peg transfer task, and also showed significant improvement in hand-eye coordination. Overall, we have demonstrated that OST-HMD based AR application provides ergonomic improvements, e.g. hand-eye coordination. In challenging situations or for novice users, the improvements in ergonomic factors lead to improvement in task performance. With continuous effort as a community, optical see-through augmented reality technology will be a useful interventional aid in the near future