Jason B. Forsyth

An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Design Course for Wearable and Pervasive Computing Products

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.

Form, function and performances in a musical instrument MAKErs camp

This experience report presents the planning, execution and results of an exploratory 5-day musical instrument MAKErs camp for K-12 students. Students used various hardware sensors, a graphical programming environment and different physical prototyping techniques to create musical instruments. The design of a musical instrument introduces students to the full spectrum of the design process including form factor and function. Throughout the camp, students shared and performed in front of their peers to gain feedback as they iterated through the design of a musical instrument.

An Interdisciplinary Design Course for Pervasive Computing

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 classs interdisciplinary teaming processes.

Tools for interdisciplinary design of pervasive computing

Purpose – To be successful, pervasive computing requires a balance of computing, design, and business requirements to be considered throughout the design process. Achieving this synthesis requires a level of interdisciplinary design that is not present in current pervasive design tools. To understand the state of the art and provide insight to future tool designers, the purpose of this paper is to present a survey of design tools for pervasive computing and consider their ability to be used in interdisciplinary design.Design/methodology/approach – The authors have performed a survey of tools covering many areas within pervasive computing and have evaluated the abilities of each tool with established metrics for pervasive design tools.Findings – While the paper has found many design tools are available for constructive pervasive applications, few are suitable through all phases of the design cycle or useful across all the intended application domains of pervasive computing.Originality/value – This survey p...

Feasibility of GPS-based warning system for roadside workers

Roadside workers and emergency responders, such as police and emergency medical technicians, are at significant risk of being struck by vehicular traffic while performing their duties. While recent work has examined active and passive systems to reduce pedestrian collisions, current approaches require line of sight using either laser, infrared, or vision based systems. We address this problem by developing a GPS-based solution that equips roadside workers and vehicles with GPS units to estimate the trajectory of oncoming traffic, and estimate whether worker strike is imminent. The results of our study show that our approach is 91% accurate in alerting the worker and vehicle of collisions and near misses. Furthermore, accurate warnings can be provided 5-6 seconds before any potential collision, allowing time for mitigating solutions.

Extracting behavioral information from electronic storyboards

In this paper we outline methods for extracting behavioral descriptions of interactive prototypes from electronic storyboards. This information is used to help interdisciplinary design teams evaluate potential ideas early in the design process. Using electronic storyboards provides a common descriptive medium where team members from different disciplinary backgrounds can collectively express the intended behavior of their prototype. The behavioral information is extracted by a combination of visual tags applied to elements of the storyboard, analysis of storyboard layout, and natural language processing of text written in the frames. We describe this process, provide a proof of concept example, and discuss design choices in developing this tool.

Using electronic storyboards to support interdisciplinary design of pervasive computing systems

In an interdisciplinary setting, the rapid creation and evaluation of prototypes is critical to achieve a favorable design outcome. For pervasive computing systems, this means creating many interactive prototypes, often when non-computing team members are unfamiliar with programming, networking, or sensing. To overcome this difficulty we propose the use of electronic storyboards as a tool to define pervasive computing systems. Our research will show how storyboards can be used to capture behavioral elements such as action, context, and time. From the storyboard we will create formal models about the behavior of the prototype that can be synthesized or simulated.