Context-aware gestural interaction in the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyTechnology is becoming pervasive and the current interfaces are not adequate for the interaction with the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era. Recently, researchers have started to address this issue introducing the concept of natural user interface, which is mainly based on gestural interactions. Many issues are still open in this emerging domain and, in particular, there is a lack of common guidelines for coherent implementation of gestural interfaces. This research investigates gestural interactions between humans and smart environments. It proposes a novel framework for the high-level organization of the context information. The framework is conceived to provide the support for a novel approach using functional gestures to reduce the gesture ambiguity and the number of gestures in taxonomies and improve the usability. In order to validate this framework, a proof-of-concept has been developed. A prototype has been developed by implementing a novel method for the view-invariant recognition of deictic and dynamic gestures. Tests have been conducted to assess the gesture recognition accuracy and the usability of the interfaces developed following the proposed framework. The results show that the method provides optimal gesture recognition from very different view-points whilst the usability tests have yielded high scores. Further investigation on the context information has been performed tackling the problem of user status. It is intended as human activity and a technique based on an innovative application of electromyography is proposed. The tests show that the proposed technique has achieved good activity recognition accuracy. The context is treated also as system status. In ubiquitous computing, the system can adopt different paradigms: wearable, environmental and pervasive. A novel paradigm, called synergistic paradigm, is presented combining the advantages of the wearable and environmental paradigms. Moreover, it augments the interaction possibilities of the user and ensures better gesture recognition accuracy than with the other paradigms

LOW LATENCY ON-BOARD DATA HANDLING FOR EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITES USING OFF-THE-SHELF COMPONENTS

Satellite Earth Observation (EO) is nowadays receiving significant attention. In this regard, the latency of EO product provision to the ground segment is undoubtedly among the first key performance indicators for these systems. The European Union Horizon 2020 EO-ALERT project aims at overcoming the limitations of traditional Near Real-Time (NRT) onboard data chain architectures by moving all the critical processing tasks on the flight segment and accelerating them using high-performance commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. The resulting architecture minimizes the amount of transmitted data and eliminates ground-based data processing from the EO data chain, hence achieving actual real-time product delivery in less than 5 min with optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. This paper presents the performance benefits of a mixed software-hardware design of the CPU Scheduling, Compression, Encryption, and Data Handling (CS-CEDH) Subsystem responsible for data compression and encryption as well as data routing and scheduling tasks. Compared to a software-only solution, the exploited High-Level Synthesis (HLS) methodology enables 5 to 7-fold speed-up in onboard image compression and encryption tasks and 2 to 5-fold reduction in the contribution of the CS-CEDH Subsystem to the overall onboard image data chain while contributing by less than 1 s to the delivery of the alerts to the end-user

High-Level Synthesis of a Single/Multi-Band Optical and SAR Image Compression and Encryption Hardware Accelerator

Transmitting images from earth observation satellites to ground is a major challenge, and a compression/encryption stage is actually mandatory. Development of hardware accelerators is highly recommended, both to relieve the software from such demanding task, and to improve performance, aiming at quasi-real-time data processing. To this end, we discuss the design, development, deployment and test of a FPGA-based accelerator, featuring a lossless and lossy (near-lossless) compression, including the data encryption too. Its architecture is well suited for different image types, including single- and multi-band optical and SAR images and can be fully run-time configurable. Measured performance showed a throughput of 10 Msamples/s, in agreement with related state-of-the-art works, focused on lossless compression only

Affective Interaction in Smart Environments

AbstractWe present a concept where the smart environments of the future will be able to provide ubiquitous affective communication. All the surfaces will become interactive and the furniture will display emotions. In particular, we present a first prototype that allows people to share their emotional states in a natural way. The input will be given through facial expressions and the output will be displayed in a context-aware multimodal way. Two novel output modalities are presented: a robotic painting that applies the concept of affective communication to the informative art and an RGB lamp that represents the emotions remaining in the user's peripheral attention. An observation study has been conducted during an interactive event and we report our preliminary findings in this paper

Gesturing on the steering wheel, a comparison with speech and touch interaction modalities

This paper compares an emergent interaction modality for the In-Vehicle Infotainment System (IVIS), i.e., gesturing on the steering wheel, with two more popular modalities in modern cars: touch and speech. We conducted a betweensubjects experiment with 20 participants for each modality to assess the interaction performance with the IVIS and the impact on the driving performance. Moreover, we compared the three modalities in terms of usability, subjective workload and emotional response. The results showed no statically significant differences between the three interaction modalities regarding the various indicators for the driving task performance, while significant differences were found in measures of IVIS interaction performance: users performed less interactions to complete the secondary tasks with the speech modality, while, in average, a lower task completion time was registered with the touch modality. The three interfaces were comparable in all the subjective metrics

PEGASO: a personalised and motivational ICT system to empower adolescents towards healthy lifestyles

Unhealthy alimentary behaviours and physical inactivity habits are key risk factors for major non communicable diseases. Several researches demonstrate that juvenile obesity can lead to serious medical conditions, pathologies and have important psycho-social consequences. PEGASO is a multidisciplinary project aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles among teenagers through assistive technology. The core of this project is represented by the ICT system, which allows providing tailored interventions to the users through their smartphones in order to motivate them. The novelty of this approach consists of developing a Virtual Individual Model (VIM) for user characterization, which is based on physical, functional and behavioural parameters opportunely selected by experts. These parameters are digitised and updated thanks to the user monitoring through smartphone; data mining algorithms are applied for the detection of activity and nutrition habits and this information is used to provide personalised feedback. The user interface will be developed using gamified approaches and integrating serious games to effectively promote health literacy and facilitate behaviour change

VEGAS: A VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey. II. Photometric study of giant ellipticals and their stellar halos

Observations of diffuse starlight in the outskirts of galaxies are thought to be a fundamental source of constraints on the cosmological context of galaxy assembly in the $\Lambda$CDM model. Such observations are not trivial because of the extreme faintness of such regions. In this work, we investigate the photometric properties of six massive early type galaxies (ETGs) in the VEGAS sample (NGC 1399, NGC 3923, NGC 4365, NGC 4472, NGC 5044, and NGC 5846) out to extremely low surface brightness levels, with the goal of characterizing the global structure of their light profiles for comparison to state-of-the-art galaxy formation models. We carry out deep and detailed photometric mapping of our ETG sample taking advantage of deep imaging with VST/OmegaCAM in the g and i bands. By fitting the light profiles, and comparing the results to simulations of elliptical galaxy assembly, we identify signatures of a transition between "relaxed" and "unrelaxed" accreted components and can constrain the balance between in situ and accreted stars. The very good agreement of our results with predictions from theoretical simulations demonstrates that the full VEGAS sample of $\sim 100$ ETGs will allow us to use the distribution of diffuse light as a robust statistical probe of the hierarchical assembly of massive galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Co-designing an Embodied e-Coach With Older Adults: The Tangible Coach Journey

This article describes a tangible interface for an e-coach, co-designed in four countries to meet older adults’ needs and expectations. The aim of this device is to coach the user by giving recommendations, personalized tasks and to build empathy through vocal, visual, and physical interaction. Through our co-design process, we collected insights that helped identifying requirements for the physical design, the interaction design and the privacy and data control. In the first phase, we collected users’ needs and expectations through several workshops. Requirements were then transformed into three design concepts that were rated and commented by our target users. The final design was implemented and tested in three countries. We discussed the results and the open challenges for the design of physical e-coaches for older adults. To encourage further developments in this field, we released the research outputs of this design process in an open-source repository

Advanced Data Chain Technologies for the Next Generation of Earth Observation Satellites Supporting On-Board Processing for Rapid Civil Alerts

The growing number of planned Earth Observation (EO) satellites, together with the increase in payload resolution and swath, brings to the fore the generation of unprecedented volumes of data that needs to be downloaded, processed and distributed with low latency. This creates a severe bottleneck problem, which overloads ground infrastructure, communications to ground, and hampers the provision of EO products to the End User with the required performances. The European H2020 EO-ALERT project (http://eo-alert-h2020.eu/), proposes the definition of next-generation EO missions by developing an on-board high speed EO data processing chain, based on a novel flight segment architecture that moves optimised key EO data processing elements from the ground segment to on-board the satellite. EO-ALERT achieves, globally, latencies below five minutes for EO products delivery, reaching latencies below 1 minute in some scenarios. The proposed architecture solves the above challenges through a combination of innovations in the on-board elements of the data chain and the communications link. Namely, the architecture introduces innovative technological solutions, including on-board reconfigurable data handling, on-board image generation and processing for generation of alerts (EO products) using Artificial Intelligence (AI), high-speed on-board avionics, on-board data compression and encryption using AI and reconfigurable high data rate communication links to ground including a separate chain for alerts with minimum latency and global coverage. Those key technologies have been studied, developed, implemented in software/hardware (SW/HW) and verified against previously established technologies requirements to meet the identified user needs. The paper presents an overview of the development of the innovative solutions defined during the project for each of the above mentioned technological areas and the results of the testing campaign of the individual SW/HW implementations within the context of two operational scenarios: ship detection and extreme weather observation (nowcasting), both requiring a high responsiveness to events to reduce the response time to few hours, or even to minutes, after an emergency situation arises. The technologies have been experimentally evaluated during the project using relevant EO historical sensor data. The results demonstrate the maturity of the technologies, having now reached TRL 4-5. Generally, the results show that, when implemented using COTS components and available communication links, the proposed architecture can generate and delivery globally EO products/alerts with a latency lower than five minutes, which demonstrates the viability of the EO-ALERT concept. The paper also discusses the implementation on an Avionic Test Bench (ATB) for the validation of the integrated technologies chain