Wearable Sanitizer: Design and Implementation of an Open-source, On-body Sanitizer

Pat Pataranutaporn, Ali Shtarbanov, Glenn Fernandes, Jingwen Li, Parinya Punpongsanon, Joe Paradiso, and Pattie Maes. 2020. Wearable Sanitizer: Design and Implementation of an Open-source, On-body Sanitizer. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Emerging Technologies (SA '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1, 1–2. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3415255.3422897.SA '20: SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 [December 4 - 13, 2020

The Nature of biodesigned systems: Directions for HCI

The nascent field of biodesign uses the biological affordances of organisms to address some user need. These can range from the development of novel materials, which the designer actively investigates, to applications of synthetic biology or the creation of bio-digital hybrid systems. Within biodesign there is a question for interaction design: what will interactive systems look like in a guided and grown environment, rather than a built environment? In this workshop, we will explore new technologies that rely on symbiotic relationships between the user and organisms that participate in interactive systems. The goal of this workshop is to engage the interaction design community in exploring new aspects of designing for living computational systems

Speculating on biodesign in the future home

The home is a place of shelter, a place for family, and for separation from other parts of life, such as work. Global challenges, the most pressing of which are currently the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change has forced extra roles into many homes and will continue to do so in the future. Biodesign integrates living organisms into designed solutions and can offer opportunities for new kinds of technologies to facilitate a transition to the home of the future. Many families have had to learn to work alongside each other, and technology has mediated a transition from standard models of operation for industries. These are the challenges of the 21st century that mandate careful thinking around interactive systems and innovations that support new ways of living and working at home. In this workshop, we will explore opportunities for biodesign interactive systems in the future home. We will bring together a broad group of researchers in HCI, design, and biosciences to build the biodesign community and discuss speculative design futures. The outcome will generate an understanding of the role of interactive biodesign systems at home, as a place with extended functionalities

Towards closed-loop bio-digital human augmentation

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September, 2020Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.We explore the vision of closed-loop bio-digital interfaces for human augmentation, where the bio-digital system allows for both sensing and writing biological information to the body. Current-generation wearable devices sense an individual's physiological data such as heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity, and EEG, but lack in sensing their biological counterparts, which drive the majority of individual's physiological signals. On the other hand, biosensors for detecting biochemical markers are currently limited to one-time use, are non-continuous and don't provide flexibility in choosing which biomarker they sense. We believe that the future for wearable biosensors lies in going beyond specific sensing capabilities and becoming a wearable "lab" on body, where a small device can offer a fully integrated and re-configurable system that mimics several processes usually performed in the laboratory for clinical diagnostics and analysis of human health. To illustrate our vision of having a lab on body, we prototyped "Wearable Lab" a bio-digital platform for sensing biochemical and digital data from saliva. Our platform contains digital sensors such as an IMU for activity recognition, as well as an automated system for continuous sampling of biomarkers from saliva by leveraging existing paper-based biochemical sensors. The platform could aid with longitudinal studies of biomarkers and early diagnosis of diseases. We present example data collected from the device, show a preliminary evaluation, and discuss the limitation of our platform.by Pat Pataranutaporn.S.M.S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Science

Fluorescent carbon dots based phytosensor for indoor formaldehyde pollution monitoring

abstract: Indoor formaldehyde pollution released from household products is one of the major causes of several health diseases. Ornamental plants have been paid more attention recently to improve air quality and increase natural decorative appeal. Therefore, we aimed to use ornamental plants as a plant-based biosensor or phytosensor to monitor/detect indoor formaldehyde exposure. The synthesized carbon dots with nitrogen doping (N-doped CDs) in this study shows a big “turn-off” significant response with high selectivity to formaldehyde. The lowest formaldehyde concentration that gave the observable fluorescence quenching signal by naked eye on Fittonia albivenis (Nerve Plant) was 50.0 μg/L, which is lower than the exposure limit of 80.0 μg/L as indicated by World Health Organization. The results showed that ornamental plants with the aid of N-doped CDs can be developed into phytosensor for formaldehyde detection. Furthermore, findings in this study will be useful for the development of plant biosensor for other indoor air pollution monitoring

Wearable Wisdom: An Intelligent Audio-Based System for Mediating Wisdom and Advice

© 2020 Owner/Author. Having good mentors and role models is important for personal growth. However, they are not always available at the time of need. Some of our personal heroes have passed away leaving only their wisdom through writings and other artifacts. We present Wearable Wisdom, an intelligent, audio-based system for mediating wisdom and advice from mentors and personal heroes to a user. It does so by performing automated semantic analysis on the collected wisdom database and generating a simulated voice of a mentor sharing relevant wisdom and advice with the user. The results show that our platform is statistically superior in delivering relevant, yet abstract wisdom as well as providing more inspiration compared to control. We describe the implementation of the Wearable Wisdom system, report on a user study, and discuss potential applications of wisdom computation for supporting personal growth and motivation