Lasse Virtanen

Solar shirt: design of an environmental awareness wearable

The Solar Shirt is a wearable computing design concept and demo in the area of sustainable and ecological design. The Solar Shirt showcases a concept, which detects the level of noise pollution in the wearers environment and illustrates it with a garment-integrated display. In addition, the design concept utilizes printed electronic solar cells as part of the garment design, illustrating a design vision towards zero energy wearable computing. The Solar Shirt uses reindeer leather as its main material, giving a soft and luxurious feeling to the garment. The material selections and the style of the garment derive their inspiration from Arctic Design, reflecting the purity of nature and the simplicity and silence of a snowy world.

Investigating drone motion as pedestrian guidance

Flying drones have the potential to act as navigation guides for pedestrians, providing more direct guidance than the use of handheld devices. Rather than equipping a drone with a display or indicators, we explore the potential for the drones movements to communicate the route to the walker. For example, should the drone maintain a constant distance a few meters in front of the pedestrian, or should it position itself further along the navigation route, acting as a beacon to walk towards? We created a set of flying drone gestures and evaluated them in an online survey (n = 100) and an in-the-wild user test (n = 10) where participants were guided on a walking route by a flying drone. As a result, we propose an initial set of drone gestures for pedestrian navigation and provide further design recommendations.

Concepting Wearables for Ice-Hockey Youth

In this workshop paper, we present our work in progress where we utilize sensor-based wellness data to benefit teenage ice-hockey players in their hobby. We created an application concept and mock-ups of wearable sensors, and conducted a service design workshop with a teenage ice-hockey team.

MyData Approach for Personal Health -- A Service Design Case for Young Athletes

Collecting a digital footprint of data from ones everyday activities is becoming an information source for preventive health care. Wearable sensor technologies combined with mobile phone applications offer an interesting way to collect and monitor personal activity data for personal use, in addition to providing information for wellness and health care professionals. In this paper we present our service design approach for designing a mobile MyData Wellness concept that was developed for young athletes. The concept aims to combine different possibilities of mobile technologies to create a tool that can provide versatile support for wellness. The salient findings from the concept evaluation show that active young people find tracking sports data motivating and interesting, and call for a unified service that combines different wellness-related aspects of life.

Clothes integrated visual markers as self-expression tool

In this demo, we present a concept where garment-integrated visual markers are used for self-expression. We present a wearable design, where clothing design style integrates with the visual design of AR markers, which are read with a mobile phone or tablet. The garment functions as a platform for self-expression, and the demo illustrates how both the AR content and the placement of the markers can play a role in the self-expression.

Physically Guiding Touch Screen Interaction with Public Displays

This paper presents a novel approach on guiding people how to interact with touch screen based public displays. In our approach, we apply an additional layer of transparent plastic employing different shapes of laser cut holes that is placed on top of the public display. The holes restrict the touch screen input area, and provide a physical guidance to the user on interactive elements on the screen. This enables interaction styles with the screen that are not practical in the unguided case. Moreover, the guiding plastic layer can easily be replaced with another one with altering pattern. This provides opportunities to apply different interaction templates e.g. according to the displays location or users.

Experiences with wellness ring and bracelet form factor

This paper explores experiences with ring and bracelet activity tracker form factors. During the first week of a 2-week field study participants (n=6) wore non-functional mock-ups of ring and bracelet wellness trackers, and provided feedback on their experiences. During the second week, participants used a commercial wellness tracking ring, which collected physical exercise and sleep data and visualized it in a mobile application. Our salient findings based on 196 user diary entries suggest, that the ring form factor is considered beautiful, aesthetic and contributing to the wearers image. However, the bracelet form factor is more practical for active lifestyle, and preferred in situations where the hands are performing tasks requiring gripping objects, such as sport activities, cleaning the car, cooking and washing dishes. Users strongly identified the ring form factor as jewellery that is intended to be seen, whereas bracelets were considered hidden and inconspicuous elements of the users ensemble.

Guided touch screen: enhanced eyes-free interaction

Touch screen based interfaces are pervading into areas such as car and industrial machinery control systems, where more tangible, physical interfaces have historically been used. This often results in a reduction in the possibility to operate the interface without the need to continuously look at the display. We present a novel approach aiming to increase the performance of eyes-free interaction with a touch screen User Interface (UI). A layer of transparent Perspex with cut-outs corresponding to the tracks of slider components in the visual UI is attached to the touch screen, guiding the interaction. A prototype system, where the user operated a remote visual task via a touch screen was evaluated in a user test with both unguided and guided conditions. The results illustrate the potential for adding a guidance layer to touch screens in applications where the output of the interaction is disconnected from the touch screen based input.

Projected Fiducial Markers for Dynamic Content Display on Guided Tours

In this paper, we present a novel interaction technique -- combining mobile projection and visible, fiducial marker based information display. We envision it to be suitable for small groups e.g. for narrative playful experiences and for guiding in places where physical tags would be disturbing. This interaction technique, where one person (the guide) is projecting a marker and other users can read it with their mobile devices, enables in situ information delivery where the guide can control the dynamics of the situation. We present an example use case of using the interaction technique on a guided tour, and preliminary results from the user evaluation.

Mediating Interaction Between Healthcare Professionals and Patients with a Dual-Sided Tablet

We present and evaluate a functional prototype of a dual-sided tablet, where the back of the tablet presents complementary information to a patient during a medical consultation. Handheld tablet computers are nowadays part of the standard toolkit used by healthcare professionals, however, rather than supporting the interaction between the two parties, the device usage may create a communication barrier. Evaluation of the dual-sided tablet by healthcare workers and via an on online survey revealed that both groups considered the concept beneficial. Display of information on the medication, treatment timeline, and vital measurements (e.g. blood pressure, heart rate and temperature) on the patient side of the tablet were most valued. Additionally, patients felt increased assurance that their basic information was correct.