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“…Language in Their Very Gesture” First Steps towards Calm Smart Home Input

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Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery in Complex, Unstructured, Big Data (HCI-KDD 2013)

Abstract

Weiser and Brown made it clear when they predicted the advent of ubiquitous computing: the most important and challenging aspect of developing the all-encompassing technology of the early 21st Century is the need for computers that can accept and produce information in a manner based on the natural human ways of communicating. In our first steps towards a new paradigm for calm interaction, we propose a multimodal trigger for getting the attention of a passive smart home system, and we implement a gesture recognition application on a smart phone to demonstrate three key concepts: 1) the possibility that a common gesture of human communication could be used as part of that trigger, and; 2) that some commonly understood gestures exist and can be used immediately, and; 3) that the message communicated to the system can be extracted from secondary features of a deliberate human action. Demonstrating the concept, but not the final hardware or mounting strategy, 16 individuals performed a double clap with a smart phone mounted on their upper arm. The gesture was successfully recognized in 88% of our trials. Furthermore, when asked to try and deceive the system by performing any other action that might be similar, 75% of the participants were unable to register a false positive.

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Brown, J.N.A., Kaufmann, B., Huber, F.J., Pirolt, KH., Hitz, M. (2013). “…Language in Their Very Gesture” First Steps towards Calm Smart Home Input. In: Holzinger, A., Pasi, G. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction and Knowledge Discovery in Complex, Unstructured, Big Data. HCI-KDD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39146-0_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39146-0_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39145-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39146-0

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