Christian Möllering

Future Care Floor: A Sensitive Floor for Movement Monitoring and Fall Detection in Home Environments

This paper describes the conceptualization and realization of a sensor floor, which can be integrated in home environments to assist old and frail persons living independently at home. Its purpose is to monitor the inhabitant’s position within a room, to detect (abnormal) behavioral patterns as well as to activate rescue procedures in case of fall or other emergency events. This floor is part of a living lab (“The Future Care Lab”) developed and built within the eHealth project at RWTH Aachen University. The lab, which is part of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), serves as a test environment for user centered design of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies.

A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Ambient Assisted Living

E-health, assistive technologies and applications for assisted living , E-health, assistive technologies and applications for assisted living , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی ایران

Your Floor Knows Where You Are: Sensing and Acquisition of Movement Data

This paper describes the first results on a sensor floor, which can be integrated in home environments to assist old and frail persons living independently at home. The sensor floor works with a dense array of piezo elements. Its purpose is not only to monitor the inhabitants position within the room but also to analyze impact patterns for later activation of stable rescue procedures in case of fall or other emergency events. Algorithms were developed to gain information on steps of persons in the room from the piezo impulses. The sensors are invisibly integrated in the rooms floor, which is part of a living lab (the Future Care Lab) developed and built within the eHealth project at RWTH Aachen University.

Understanding Requirements for Textile Input Devices Individually Tailored Interfaces within Home Environments

In the last few years, many countries showed an increased public awareness regarding the consequences of the demographic change, which presents considerable challenges on future health care systems in the next decades. As a framework of the research presented here, we introduce a currently running interdisciplinary research project in which novel textile input devices are to be developed, iteratively designed, and evaluated. In order to learn about the individual requirements for using smart textiles in a home context, we carried out a exploratory questionnaire study in which 72 participants aged 20-76 evaluated perceived benefits and barriers of smart textiles in the home context. Results show a first insight into user experience and the general willingness to adopt smart textile input devices. Also, the perceived suitability of functions to be controlled by those novel input devices as well as the reported appropriateness of different rooms and general device styles into which smart input devices could be integrated were collected. Results show, overall, a high willingness of participants to use smart textiles as input devices.

Design principles of hand gesture interfaces for microinteractions

We experience a drastic increase in post-desktop input devices and interaction techniques but still lack in specific and applicable design principles for these systems. This paper presents a set of design principles for hand gesture based microinteractions. The main concepts from related work are fused together in order to build a clear structure that allows heuristic evaluation. Moreover, a visualization of a gesture phrase helps understanding the relationship of crucial concepts such as feedforward/feedback and a gestures tension. The applicability of the proposed design principles is then exemplarily shown by the development of a truly ubiquitous interactive system for hand gesture based microinteractions.

Towards Accepted Smart Interactive Textiles : The Interdisciplinary Project INTUITEX

Smart Interactive Textiles combine the warmth and omnipresence of textiles in our everyday lives with the benefits of modern information and communication technologies. The potential of innovation is not only based on technical ingenuity, but also on the consideration and embedding of peoples’ fears, requirements, desires, and wishes regarding these innovative technologies. Thus, the development of smart interactive textiles requires the expertise of various disciplines. Foremost, appropriate conductive yarns must be selected and integrated into conventional fabrics. Sensors and actuators must be embedded in textiles in a way that they could be used as a user interface. The design of these textiles should meet human needs and should enable an intuitive, easy to learn, and effective interaction. To meet these requirements, potential users should be part of the development and evaluation processes of innovative smart textiles. In this article, we present a research framework that integrates several interdisciplinary perspectives (interface design, textile technology, integration and automation, communication and human factors). We realized three functional smart textile demonstrators (curtain, chair, jacket). We report on the results of this interdisciplinary research project as well as the research questions and key findings of the individual partners. In summary, this article demonstrates that interdisciplinary cooperation, user-centered and participatory design, and iterative product development are necessary for successful innovative technologies.

Gardeene! Textile Controls for the Home Environment

This work was funded in part by the German B-IT Foundation and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as project “Intuitex” (Grant No. 16SV6264K).