Smart Sensing Systems for the Daily Drive

When driving, you might sometimes wonder, "Are there any disruptions on my regular route that might delay me, and will I be able to find a parking space when I arrive?" Two smartphone-based prototype systems can help answer these questions. The first is ParkSense, which can be used to sense on-street parking-space occupancy when coupled with electronic parking payment systems. The second system can sense and recognize a user's repeated car journeys, which can be used to provide personalized alerts to the user. Both systems aim to minimize the impact of sensing tasks on the device's lifetime so that the user can continue to use the device for its primary purpose. This department is part of a special issue on smart vehicle spaces

Coordinated adaptation for adaptive context-aware applications

The ability to adapt to change is critical to both mobile and context-aware applications. This thesis argues that providing sufficient support for adaptive context-aware applications requires support for coordinated adaptation. Specifically, the main argument of this thesis is that coordinated adaptation requires applications to delegate adaptation control to an entity that can receive state information from multiple applications and trigger adaptation in multiple applications. Furthermore, coordination requires support for reconfiguration of the adaptive behaviour and user involvement. Failure to support coordinated adaptation is shown to lead to poor system and application performance and insufficient support for user requirements. An investigation of the existing state-of-the-art in the areas of adaptive and context- aware systems and an analysis of the limitations of existing systems leads to the establishment of a set of design requirements for the support of coordinated adaptation. Specifically, adaptation control should be decoupled from the mechanisms implementing the adaptive behaviour of the applications, applications should externalise both state information and the adaptive mechanisms they support and the adaptation control mechanism should allow modifications without the need for re-implementation of either the application or the support platform. This thesis presents the design of a platform derived from the aforementioned re- quirements. This platform utilises a policy based mechanism for controlling adaptation. Based on the particular requirements of adaptive context-aware applications a new pol- icy language is defined derived from Kowalsky’s Event Calculus logic programming formalism. This policy language allows the specification of policy rules where condi- tions are defined through the expression of temporal relationships between events and entities that represent duration (i.e. fluents). A prototype implementation of this design allowed the evaluation of the features offered by this platform. This evaluation reveals that the platform can support coordinated adaptation with acceptable performance cost.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

weSport: Utilising Wrist-Band Sensing to Detect Player Activities in Basketball Games

Wristbands have been traditionally designed to track the activities of a single person. However there is an opportunity to utilize the sensing capabilities of wristbands to offer activity tracking services within the domain of team-based sports games. In this paper we demonstrate the design of an activity tracking system capable of detecting the players’ activities within a one-to-one basketball game. Relying on the inertial sensors of wristbands and smartphones, the system can capture the shooting attempts of each player and provide statistics about their performance. The system is based on a two- level classification architecture, combining data from both players in the game. We employ a technique for semi-automatic labelling of the ground truth that requires minimum manual input during a training game. Using a single game as a training dataset, and applying the classifier on future games we demonstrate that the system can achieve a good level of accuracy detecting the shooting attempts of both players in the game (precision 91.34%, recall 94.31%)

Tracking daily routines of elderly users through acoustic sensing: An unsupervised learning approach

Assistive technologies that can passively track people’s daily activities with dementia can deliver significant benefits for the patients themselves and their carers. This work investigates the feasibility of developing a system for the unsupervised tracking of daily activities at home through acoustic sensing. Motivated by the wide adoption of intelligent voice assistant devices in home environments, we developed a prototype algorithm to identify diversions from typical activities using the captured sounds, without the need for activity labelling. The system relies on sound embeddings through a pre-trained model, a novel dimensionality reduction algorithm, and the application of dynamic time warping for pattern matching. Our evaluation through synthetic activity sequences using data from our data collection in addition to public datasets shows very good performance (precision 0.99, recall 0.95)

Quantitative Shape Measurement of An Inflatable Rubber Dam Using Inertial Sensors

Shape measurement is of great importance for the effective control and safe operation of inflatable rubber dams. This paper presents for the first time a method to measure the cross-sectional shape of a rubber dam by placing an array of inertial measurement units (IMUs) on the peripheral of the rubber dam. The IMU array measures tangent angles of the dam peripheral by fusing accelerometer and gyroscope measurements. A continuous tangent angle function is derived by interpolating the tangent angles at discrete locations using a cubic spline. Finally, the shape is reconstructed by integrating the tangent angle function along the peripheral of the rubber dam. The performance of the measurement system is validated against a camera on a purpose-built test rig. Experimental results show that the measured and reference shapes are very similar, with a maximum similarity index of 8.5% under typical conditions. In addition, it is demonstrated that the system is robust against node failure by excluding readings of faulty nodes from shape reconstruction

Investigating Smartphones and AR Glasses for Pedestrian Navigation and their Effects in Spatial Knowledge Acquisition

Abstract–Moving in a complex and changing environment (rapid expansion of cities, creation of new transport lines, etc.) requires more and more capacity for path determination and following. This paper presents a protocol of a user study under progress. Its aim is to compare an application on AR Glasses and Smartphone to help pedestrians to memorize path following recommended landmarks

Exploring the Potential of Mobile Projectors as a Body-Instrument for Performance

Artists and scholars have been experimenting with interactive digital media to expand the aesthetic possibilities of their body movement and develop new performances. Based on our experience with implementing mobile projectors in public spaces, we propose three directions that take advantage of their capacity for performance conception and design. We also highlight the challenges that artists and HCI researchers may face when attempting to include mobile projectors in performances