rehab touch from Meng Shi on Vimeo.

The idea of the final project is to explore some possible way to detect people’s gesture when they touch something.

Background:

Stroke affects the majority survivors’ abilities to live independently and their quality of life.

The rehabilitation in hospital is extremly expensive and cannot be covered by medical insurance.

What we are doing is to provide them possible low cost solution, which is a home-based rehabilitation system.

Touche:

www.disneyresearch.com/project/touche-touch-and-gesture-sensing-for-the-real-world/

Touch and activate:

dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2501989

These two are using different way to realize gesture detection, touche is using capacitor change in the circuit while Touch and Activate is using frequency to detect frequency change.

My explore of these two based on two instructions:

Instructable: www.instructables.com/id/Touche-for-Arduino-Advanced-touch-sensing/

Ali: http://artfab.art.cmu.edu/touch-and-activate/

At first I explored “Touche”, and show it in critique,  after final critique, move to “touch and activate”.

In order to realize feedback, I connect Max and Processing to do visualization in processing, since it seems Max is not very good at data visualization part. (I didn’t find good lib to do data visualization in Max, maybe also because my limitation knowledge of Max.)

Limitation of system:

“Touch and Activate” seems not work very well in noising environment even it just use high frequency (like the final demo environment).

The connection between Max and Processing is not very strong. So if I want to do some complicated pattern, the signal is too weak to do that.

Flu Trend Data Visualization from Meng Shi on Vimeo.

“Flu Trend” is a physical data visualization of flu in different city of USA. Data from Google ORG.

In this one, I choose Pittsburgh and San Diego. The brightness of LED light indicate the serious of the flu. With the date display on screen, we can understand when is the most serious time and we should go to health centre to get a vaccine.

Because I get a bad cold recent days, I hope it can help people to take care in this season (During the visualization, from Nov-Jan is the most serious period every year). It could work as a advertisement of health care centre or hospital, to encourage people to get a vaccine when necessary.

There are two small project which try to help rehabilitation training be more interesting.

As we know, the rehabilitation training is hard and boring for stroke patients. For example, for one single grasp, they need to practice hundreds of time. But there are so many grasp, like medium wrap, lateral pinch, Thumb-Index Finger, Thumb-2 Finger and so on.

For the muscle wire hand, it uses muscle wire to control the transform of the paper hand. It could help to indicate stroke patient to open and close their hands.

For the magnet ring, by using the magnet, instead of just training grasp, the object may “hide/attract” to you which make the process interactive.

“Gravity of Light” is a wearable technology art made of 3D printed smart textile that displays the wearer’s natural movement of head such as tilting. With embedded custom designed electronic circuitry in a hat, light pixels
move on the surface of the hat flowing toward titled direction.

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Traditionally, fiction creates and induces emotions and empathy through words and images.  By using a combination of networked sensors and actuators, the Sensory Fiction author is provided with new means of conveying plot, mood, and emotion while still allowing space for the reader’s imagination. These tools can be wielded to create an immersive storytelling experience tailored to the reader.

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SuperShoes are a pair of flexible inner soles that you can flex, twist and put in any of your shoes to make them a supershoe. Each of these soles have three vibrotactile motors that tickle your toes, a capacitive pad that recognizes your touch and serves as an input modality. Onboard micro controller, low-power bluetooth and battery supplement the interface. The soles talk to the smartphone to use its location and data services. Users register onto ShoeCentral – once – where they populate their likes and dislikes (food, people, shopping, weather, places, hobbies, activities, interests etc) and social preferences. The ShoeCentral keeps learning about user preferences as you use the SuperShoes to go around.

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Moff develops and produces human interface devices, making computers more friendly for humans.

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The FingerReader is a wearable device that assists in reading printed text. It is a tool both for visually impaired people that require help with accessing printed text, as well as an aid for language translation. Wearers scan a text line with their finger and receive an audio feedback of the words and a haptic feedback of the layout: start and end of line, new line, and other cues. The FingerReader algorithm knows to detect and give feedback when the user veers away from the baseline of the text, and helps them maintain a straight scanning motion within the line.

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Bad Trip: Navigate My Mind from KwanAlan on Vimeo.

Bad Trip is a videogame installation that enables people to navigate the author’s mind using a game controller.

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