Sensing Hand Interactions with Everyday Objects by Profiling Wrist Topography

Author

Julius Cosmo Romeo Rudolph, David Holman, Bruno De Araujo, Ricardo Jota, Daniel Wigdor, Valkyrie Savage, TEI 2022

Wrist Topography, Capacitive Sensing, Wristband, Everyday Objects, Affordances

examine how we can further increase contextual awareness about user activities and their environment

the intersection of wrist-worn sensing and interaction with objects in ubiquitous environments.

infer properties of unaugmented everyday objects and the user’s interaction with those objects by measuring continuous, instantaneous changes of wrist topography with capacitive signals.
Capacitive Sensing at the Skin Surface
- parallel plate capacitors
Sensing At the Wrist
- wrist-worn devices are unobtrusive and do not restrict hand motion or grasp
Wristband Prototype
- Tactual Labs sensing platform
- extensor tendons, where the printed receivers are located
Signals for Sensing
- data recording
- a live but abstract visualization ofcaptured heatmap data
- a timestamped CSV when recording is done
Sensor Placement on the Wrist - pilot data collection
- Procedure
  - removed and replaced the band five times in the same location
  - used a conductive rod and gantry to test our sensor
- Participants
  - 10 participants, wrist circumferences varied between 152 and 205 mm
- Results
  - transformed our raw data into topographical maps
  - narrow the sensor in later studies to focus on the tendons

Using Ubiquitous Controls
Software Implementation
Evaluation
- Hypothesis: The Ubiquitous Controls pipeline enables users to input interpolated range values within 1.5s