Wearable Computing

Energy Expenditure Prediction Using a Miniaturized Ear-Worn Sensor

by Louis Atallah

Validation Of An Ear Worn Sensor For Activity Monitoring In COPD

by Louis Atallah

Distributed inferencing with ambient and wearable sensors

by Louis Atallah

Self calibrating Wearable Active Running Aymmetry Measurement and correctio

by Michele Fiorentino

In Transit: Roam and Apparent Wind interaction design concepts

by Teresa Almeida

TEI’11, Work-in-Progress Workshop
Jan 23–26, 2011, Madeira, Funchal, Portugal.

In this paper I present a series of concept designs that address modes of ecological transportation: concerned with... more In this paper I present a series of concept designs that address modes of ecological transportation: concerned with the urban ecology, these are portable devices design proposals for a public bus and body-devices for bicyclists. Could these promote a better understanding of the urban natural systems and therefore encourage ecological activities within a community? This project refers to ongoing research which aim is to develop engaged and poetic technology-enabled artifacts that might contribute to the adoption of sustainable means of transportation. The following are discussed: a set of devices that intend to provide young riders in a public bus with tools to establish a closer contact with the environment and wildlife; a collection of body-devices designed for bicyclists that are accessories which reveal the wind catch while roaming about.

Erasing Environment: The Soldier of the Future and Utopian Smart Textiles

by Kirsty Robertson

Scapegoat: Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy issue 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 15-16.

Sensors in a sleeve register a wound and the fabric tightens, forming a tourniquet; anthrax spores bond to the... more Sensors in a sleeve register a wound and the fabric tightens, forming a tourniquet; anthrax spores bond to the polymers of manufactured fibers, protecting the wearer from infection and disease; a soldier wearing a technologically-enhanced uniform communicates with satellites. This paper looks at the multi-billion dollar industry of military and medical textile creation – a competitive world of multi-national experimentation and innovation that ranges from the mundane to the bizarre. Capital flows openly into this world from government and private sources, all pouring funding in to a soft arms race, characterized by attempts to protect soldiers from their immediate environments (of IEDs or hot temperatures, for example) and medical patients from the inevitable (infection, decay, death).  Drawing on a personal experience of “accidentally” being invited to a Canadian government-organized Soldier of the Future brainstorming session at Chateau Laurier (in Ottawa), this essay begins by exploring industry attempts to “erase environment” while preserving the humanity of the soldier. The article then veers off into the imaginative and experimental using a series of art projects that situate themselves at the overlap of human, military and technological geographies to ask what it might it mean to repurpose military garb from the lo-tech to the high-tech for ultimately different purposes – revealing the humanity of the wearer while exposing the contingency and constructedness of surrounding environments.

Toward Objective Monitoring of Ingestive Behavior In Free-Living Population

by Edward Sazonov

E.Sazonov, S.Schuckers, P. Lopez-Meyer, O. Makeyev, E. Melanson, M. Neuman and J. Hill, Obesity (2009) 17 10, 1971–1975.

Understanding of eating behaviors associated with obesity requires objective and accurate monitoring of food intake... more Understanding of eating behaviors associated with obesity requires objective and accurate monitoring of food intake patterns. Accurate methods are available for measuring total energy expenditure and its components in free living populations, but methods for measuring food intake in free-living people are far less accurate and involve self-reporting or subjective monitoring. We suggest that chews and swallows can be used for objective monitoring of ingestive behavior. This hypothesis was verified in a human study involving 20 subjects. Chews and swallows were captured during periods of quiet resting, talking and meals of varying size. The counts of chews and swallows along with other derived metrics were used to build prediction models for detection of food intake, differentiation between liquids and solids, and for estimation of the mass of ingested food. The proposed prediction models were able to detect periods of food intake with greater than 95% accuracy and a fine time resolution of 30s; differentiate solid foods from liquids with greater than 91% accuracy; predict mass of ingested food with greater than 91% accuracy for solids and 83% accuracy for liquids. In earlier publications we have shown that chews and swallows can be captured by non-invasive sensors that could be developed into a wearable device. Thus the proposed methodology could lead to the development of an innovative new way of assessing human eating behavior in free living conditions.

Non-Invasive Monitoring of Chewing and Swallowing for Objective Quantification of Ingestive Behavior

by Edward Sazonov

Edward Sazonov, Stephanie Schuckers, Paulo Lopez-Meyer, Oleksandr Makeyev, Nadezhda Sazonova, Ed Melanson, and Michael Neuman, Physiol. Meas. 29 (2008) 525-541.

A methodology of studying of ingestive behavior by non-invasive monitoring of swallowing (deglutition) and chewing... more A methodology of studying of ingestive behavior by non-invasive monitoring of swallowing (deglutition) and chewing (mastication) has been developed. The target application for the developed methodology is to study the behavioral patterns of food consumption and producing volumetric and weight estimates of energy intake. Monitoring is non-invasive based on detecting swallowing by a sound sensor located over laryngopharynx or by a bone conduction microphone and detecting chewing through a below-the-ear strain sensor. Proposed sensors may be implemented in a wearable monitoring device, thus enabling monitoring of ingestive behavior in free living individuals. In this paper, the goals in the development of this methodology are two-fold. First, a system comprised of sensors, related hardware and software for multi-modal data capture is designed for data collection in a controlled environment. Second, a protocol is developed for manual scoring of chewing and swallowing for use as a gold standard. The multi-modal data capture was tested by measuring chewing and swallowing in twenty one volunteers during periods of food intake and quiet sitting (no food intake). Video footage and sensor signals were manually scored by trained raters. Inter-rater reliability study for three raters conducted on the sample set of 5 subjects resulted in high average intra-class correlation coefficients of 0.996 for bites, 0.988 for chews, and 0.98 for swallows. The collected sensor signals and the resulting manual scores will be used in future research as a gold standard for further assessment of sensor design, development of automatic pattern recognition routines, and study of the relationship between swallowing/chewing and ingestive behavior.

An Interdisciplinary Design Course for Pervasive Computing

by Jason Forsyth

Authors: Tom Martin, Eloise Coupey, Lisa McNair, Ed Dorsa, Jason Forsyth, Sophie Kim, Ron Kemnitzer

Published in IEEE Pervasive Computing

Virginia Tech offers an interdisciplinary design course for pervasive computing products, with the goal of providing... more Virginia Tech offers an interdisciplinary design course for pervasive computing products, with the goal of providing undergraduates with the interdisciplinary and technical skills required to design and develop pervasive computing devices. The course has been developed and taught by a team of faculty from three departments—Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, and Marketing—and a faculty member from the Department of Engineering Education has helped develop the class's interdisciplinary teaming processes.

MoveON: A Multimodal Information Management Application for Police Motorcyclists

by Elias Kalapanidas

Haptic shoe for the blind

by Anirudh Sharma

Trading off prediction accuracy and power consumption for context-aware …

by Andreas Krause

An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Design Course for Wearable and Pervasive Computing Products

by Jason Forsyth

Authors: Tom Martin, Kahyun Kim, Jason Forsyth, Lisa McNair, Eloise Coupey, Ed Dorsa

Published in IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing 2011

Best Paper Nominee

This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing... more This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.

From Backpack to Handheld: The Recent Trajectory of Personal Location Aware Spatial Audio

by Nicholas Mariette

PerthDAC - 7th International Digital Arts Conference, 2007, Perth

Personal location-sensitive spatial audio describes an electronic medium within the concept of locative (audio) media,... more Personal location-sensitive spatial audio describes an electronic medium within the concept of locative (audio) media, inclusive of the physically realistic medium of audio augmented reality. These concepts describe both systems and the particular forms of resultant media in which a mobile user of the system receives audio content relative to their location in the world. Since the early 1990s, various projects have been created based on such ideas, and since then, advancement of the technology has taken the inevitable route of miniaturisation, integration and convergence with other mobile audio communication technologies. Early systems were implemented using backpacks or roll-around cases to hold components, while current systems tend to use hand-held computing devices. This progression has arrived at a point where the medium can come closer to fully realising its full potential, however, successful implementations now rely on perceptual optimisation and creative application of the technology.

From Backpack to Handheld: The Recent Trajectory of Personal Location Aware Spatial Audio

by Nicholas Mariette

Wearing Emotions

by Salvatore Iaconesi

Feasibility Study of a Wearable Carbon Monoxide Warning System for Construction Workers

by Jason Forsyth

Authors: Jason B. Forsyth, Thomas L. Martin, Deborah Young-Corbett, Ed Dorsa

Published in IEEE PerCom 2011

This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable
computing system to protect construction workers from... more This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable
computing system to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning. A pulse oximetry sensor has been integrated into a typical construction helmet to allow continuous and noninvasive monitoring of workers’ blood saturation levels. To show the feasibility of monitoring for carbon monoxide poisoning without subjecting users to dangerous conditions, a prototype for monitoring blood O2 was constructed and tested during a user study involving typical construction tasks to determine its reliability while undergoing motion. Because monitoring for blood O2 and CO involve the same principles and technologies, if monitoring O2 is feasible, then monitoring for CO will be feasible as well. The results of this initial study show that integrating an oximeter into a construction helmet will warn the user of impeding carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%.

Wearable Pulse Oximetry in Construction Envrionments

by Jason Forsyth

Master's Thesis

The goal of this project was to determine the feasibility of non-invasively monitoring the blood gases of construction... more The goal of this project was to determine the feasibility of non-invasively monitoring the blood gases of construction workers for carbon monoxide expo- sure. A blood gas sensor was integrated into a typical construction helmet to determine the feasibility of monitoring workers for carbon monoxide exposure throughout the day. In particular, this study sought to understand the impact of motion artifacts caused by the worker's activities and to determine if those activities would prevent the blood gas sensor from detecting the onset of carbon monoxide poisoning. This feasibility study was conducted using a blood oxygen sensor rather than a blood carbon monoxide sensor for several reasons. First, blood gas sensors that measure blood carbon monoxide are not readily available in suitable physical form factors. Second, sensors for blood oxygen and blood carbon monoxide operate on the same physical principles and thus will be affected in the same way by worker motions. Finally, using a blood oxygen sensor allowed the study to be conducted without exposing the human subjects to carbon monoxide. A user study was conducted to determine the distribution of motion artifacts that would be created during a typical work day. By comparing that distribution to a worst-case estimate of time to impairment, the probability that helmet will adequately monitor the worker can be established. The results of the study show that the helmet will provide a measurement capable of warning the user of on setting carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%.

An empirical task analysis of warehouse order picking using head-mounted displays

by Kimberly Weaver

Co-authored with Hannes Baumann, Thad Starner, Hendrick Iben, and Michael Lawo
Presented at CHI 2010

Evaluations of task guidance systems often focus on evaluations of new technologies rather than comparing the nuances... more Evaluations of task guidance systems often focus on evaluations of new technologies rather than comparing the nuances of interaction across the various systems. One common domain for task guidance systems is warehouse order picking. We present a method involving an easily reproducible ecologically motivated order picking environment for quantitative user studies designed to reveal differences in interactions. Using this environment, we perform a 12 participant within-subjects experiment demonstrating the advantages of a head-mounted display based picking chart over a traditional text-based pick list, a paper-based graphical pick chart, and a mobile pick-by-voice system. The test environment proved sufficiently sensitive, showing statistically significant results along several metrics with the head-mounted display system performing the best. We also provide a detailed analysis of the strategies adopted by our participants.