Maurizio Caon

Designing a desirable smart bracelet for older adults

In this paper, we present the design process of a smart bracelet that aims at enhancing the life of elderly people. The bracelet acts as a personal assistant during the users everyday life, monitoring the health status and alerting him or her about abnormal conditions, reminding medications and facilitating the everyday life in many outdoor and indoor activities.

PEGASO: Towards a Life Companion

In the frame of the PEGASO European project, we aim at promoting healthier lifestyles focusing on the alimentary education and physical activity. This paper presents the concept of health companion as the main tool to inform and push the user towards a healthier lifestyle. This companion is an advanced interface that assists and entertains the user, providing him an adequate knowledge about alimentary and physical education. The companion is based on a knowledge model of the user and its behavior; it is composed of three main facets: is tailored to the user, is based on affective design and is designed to be a life companion.

Opportunistic synergy: a classifier fusion engine for micro-gesture recognition

In this paper, we present a novel opportunistic paradigm for in-vehicle gesture recognition. This paradigm allows using two or more subsystems in a synergistic manner: they can work in parallel but the lack of some of them does not compromise the functioning of the whole system. In order to segment and recognize micro-gestures performed by the user on the steering wheel, we combine a wearable approach based on the electromyography of the users forearm muscles, with an environmental approach based on pressure sensors integrated directly on the steering wheel. We present and analyze several fusion methods and gesture segmentation strategies. A prototype has been developed and evaluated with data from nine subjects. The results prove that the proposed opportunistic system performs equal or better than each stand-alone subsystem while increasing the interaction possibilities.

Towards an Anthropomorphic Lamp for Affective Interaction

This paper presents the concept of a lamp that allows displaying and collecting users emotional states. In particular, it displays the emotional information changing colors and facial expressions; in fact, the lamp is characterized by anthropomorphic form and behavior in order to make the interaction more natural and spontaneous. The user can interact with the lamp through tangible gestures typically used in social interactions by humans. Two different scenarios involving the use of the lamp as a companion and for computer-mediated communication are presented.

Workshop on full-body and multisensory experience in ubiquitous interaction

The ubiquitous computing era is bringing to the human the possibility to interact always and everywhere with digital information. However, the interaction means used to access this information exploit only few of the human sensorimotor abilities. Most of these interactions happen through traditional desktop or mobile interfaces, which often involve just vision and hearing senses and require the movement of only one finger. The aim of this workshop is rediscovering the role of human body and senses, focusing on abilities that are often forgotten by the HCI designers, in order to provide new body experiences through the design of novel interactions in smart environments. The focus of this workshop will go beyond the mere design of multimodal interfaces and will exploit theories of embodied cognition to design new full-body experiences to explore ambient space and, more in general, the environment.

Hugginess: encouraging interpersonal touch through smart clothes

Physical contact has an important role in human well-being. In this paper, we present Hugginess, a concept of interactive system that encourages people to hug by augmenting this gesture with digital information exchange. As a proof of concept, we developed two t-shirts that reciprocally send information to the hugged person through the conductive fabric.

A pervasive game to promote social offline interaction

Human relationships are migrating from the physical world to the virtual world. Pervasive games can be a valuable and enjoyable method to bring people back to the physical world. In this position paper, we present a concept for a pervasive game, which integrates some specific mechanisms aiming at promoting social offline interaction.

WheelSense: Enabling Tangible Gestures on the Steering Wheel for In-Car Natural Interaction

This paper presents WheelSense, a system for non-distracting and natural interaction with the In-Vehicle Information and communication System (IVIS). WheelSense embeds pressure sensors in the steering wheel in order to detect tangible gestures that the driver can perform on its surface. In this application, the driver can interact by means of four gestures that have been designed to allow the execution of secondary tasks without leaving the hands from the steering wheel. Thus, the proposed interface aims at minimizing the distraction of the driver from the primary task. Eight users tested the proposed system in an evaluation composed of three phases: gesture recognition test, gesture recognition test while driving in a simulated environment and usability questionnaire. The results show that the accuracy rate is 87% and 82% while driving. The system usability scale scored 84 points out of 100.

Ubiquitous Interaction for Computer Mediated Communication of Emotions

Social awareness streams limit the expressivity of emotions in computer mediated communication. In this demo, we present a system that allows sharing emotional states in a social group with multimodal ambient feedback in order to provide a more immersive and natural interaction experience.

Affective Interaction in Smart Environments

Abstract We present a concept where the smart environments of the future will be able to provide ubiquitous affective communication. All the surfaces will become interactive and the furniture will display emotions. In particular, we present a first prototype that allows people to share their emotional states in a natural way. The input will be given through facial expressions and the output will be displayed in a context-aware multimodal way. Two novel output modalities are presented: a robotic painting that applies the concept of affective communication to the informative art and an RGB lamp that represents the emotions remaining in the users peripheral attention. An observation study has been conducted during an interactive event and we report our preliminary findings in this paper.