Tag: sensors

Sensor modules for acceleration, gyro, and magnetic field

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I came across 2 Sensor module recently released by ST Microelectronics:

There will be in the future probably very few mobile devices without such sensors. When we worked on the project TEA in 1999 it seemed far away… What can you do with sensors on the mobile? There are a few papers to read: using them for context awareness [1], for interaction [2], [3], and for creating smart devices [4].

Last week in Finland I met Antii Takaluoma (one of the co-authors of [1]) and he works now for offcode.fi – I saw impressive Linux hardware – I expect cool stuff to come 🙂

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 – 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

[2] Hinckley, K., Pierce, J., Sinclair, M., and Horvitz, E. 2000. Sensing techniques for mobile interaction. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (San Diego, California, United States, November 06 – 08, 2000). UIST ’00. ACM, New York, NY, 91-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/354401.354417

[3] Albrecht Schmidt. Implicit human computer interaction through context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 4(2):191-199, June 2000

[4] A. Schmidt and K. Van Laerhoven. How to Build Smart Appliances?, IEEE Personal Communications, p.66 – 71, (2001)

Exporting your cars information to the mobile phone

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In our user interface engineering class one of the tasks in the exercise is to create a concept design for providing information from the car on the mobile phone (e.g. millage, amount a fuel in the car, next service date, alram status, etc). The first part is to assess what information could be made accessible and what value it would create for the user. 
Today I came across a device (Tyredog TD-1000A) that is concerned with a one sub-part of this scenario: checking your pressure in the tires of the car. It is a simple sensor system, screwed on to each of the tires, connected to a wireless receiver. There is also a version that includes features for the car alarm (Tyredog TD-3000A).
Another group is looking yet again into the domain of  restaurant finders or more general night life. Apropos restaurant finders, Saturday night we got out of the subway onto union square and discussed where to go for dinner (an we probably looked disoriented). A local lady stoped and recommended the Union Square Café – and it was just great… sometimes just talking to someone in the street may provide you with an excellent alternative to technologies 😉 Perhaps the students find a solution that can reflect personal recommendations well…

Tutorial von Sensor to Context und Activity at Pervasive 2008

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Pervasive 2007 introduced a new form of tutorials – having a number of experts talking one hour about their special topic – I was last year as participant and liked it a lot. This year Pervasive 2008 repeated this approach and I contributed a tutorial on how to get context and activity from sensors (tutorial slides in PDF).

Abstract. Intelligent environments, sensor network and smart objects are inherently connected to building systems that sense phenomena in the real world and make the perceived information available to applications. In the first part of the tutorial an overview of sensors and sensor systems commonly used in pervasive computing application is given. Additionally to the sensor properties means for connecting sensors to systems (e.g. ADC, PWM, I2C, serial line) are explained. In the second part it is discussed how to create meaningful information in the application domain. Some basic features, calculated in the time and frequency domain, are introduced to provide basic means for processing and abstraction of raw sensor data. This part is complemented by a brief overview of mechanisms and methods for relating (abstracted) sensor information to context, activity and situations. Additionally general problems that are associated with sensing context and activity will be addressed in this tutorial.

A service for true random numbers

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After the exam board meeting at Trinity College in Dublin (I am external examiner for the Ubicomp program) I went back with Mads Haahr (the course director) to his office. Besides the screen on which he works he has one extra where constantly the log entries of his web server is displayed. It is an interesting awareness devices 😉 some years ago we did a project where we used the IP-address of incoming HTTP-requests to guess who the visitors are and to show their web pages on an awareness display [1], [2]. Looking back at web visitors works very well in an academic context and with request out of larger companies where one can expect that information is available on the web. Perhaps we should revisit the work and look how we can push this further given the new possibilities in the web.

The web-server Mads has in his office is pretty cool – it provides true random numbers – based on atmospheric noise picked up with 3 real radios (I saw them)! Have a look at the service for yourself: www.random.org. It provides an HTTP interface to use those numbers in your own applications. I would not have though of a web service to provide random numbers – but thinking a little more it makes a lot of sense…

[1] Schmidt, A. and Gellersen, H. 2001. Visitor awareness in the web. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on World Wide Web (Hong Kong, Hong Kong, May 01 – 05, 2001). WWW ’01. ACM, New York, NY, 745-753. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/371920.372194

[2] Gellersen, H. and Schmidt, A. 2002. Look who’s visiting: supporting visitor awareness in the web. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 56, 1 (Jan. 2002), 25-46. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.2001.0514

Will cars become a more open platform?

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Today I met with Matthias Kranz in Munich. Besides discussing his thesis I got to see his new car (a prius) – quite impressive and interesting interfaces. Later I met with Wolfang Spießl who started recently his PhD in cooperation with BMW – again seeing an interesting and impressive (test)car.

It is really curious to see that there is a lot of interest in the hobbyist communities on car interfaces and protocols. In the June/2007 issues of Elektor (http://www.elektor.de/) was an article on a OBD-2-analyser, in a recent issue of the EAM (http://www.eam-magazin.de/) was a similar article and there are many community sites on the WWW, e.g. http://www.canhack.de/

Perhaps we could do in one of our pervasive computing related classes a project on this topic? There are so many technical opportunities and the challenge is to find the convincing applications!

Sensing a common tools – when will it be integrated in building materials?

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This morning a heating and water technician checked on the wet spots on my wall in my new flat in Essen. Using a hygrometer he looked for the area which is most damp and then he broke a hole into the wall. After opening the wall, it was very easy to see that the outside wall is wet and that the heating is OK.

The hole in the wall does not really look good 🙁

This makes me wonder when building materials, with sensing included will move from the lab to the real world. Pipe insulation, plaster boards, stones with integrated sensors would be quite easy to create and there are ideas to do it in a cheap and easy way. In the context of Pin&Play (later Voodoo I/O) we explored some ideas but never completed the prototypes for real use. Perhaps this could be an interesting project…

Object with included sensing

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I often wonder why one would like to include sensing into other objects. It seems however that there is a tradition and has its roots before the digital 🙂

The pencil case has a thermometer included. The function is that the pupil can figure out when they get the rest of the day off due to high temperature (Hitzefrei). Not convinced that is was a great seller…

Visit to the Wearable Computing Lab at ETH Zurich

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I was at ETH Zurich for the PhD defence of Nagendra Bhargava Bharatula. His thesis is on context-aware wearable nodes and in particular on the trade-offs in design and the design space of these devices.

The tour in Prof. Tröster’s lab was very impressive. It is a very active and probably one of the largest groups world wide doing research in wearable computing. It seams that wearable computing is getting more real, many scenarios and demonstrators are much more realistic and useful than several years ago.

In the backmanager project Corinne Mattmann works on a shirt that measures body posture. Using stretch sensors made of elastic threads, which are fixed with silicon to the fabric they can measure several different body postures. The material is really interesting (probably done by http://www.empa.ch/) and I think such technologies will open up many new opportunities. (further reading: Design Concept of Clothing Recognizing Back Postures; C. Mattmann, G. Tröster; Proc. 3rd IEEE-EMBS International Summer School and Symposium on Medical Devices and Biosensors (ISSS-MDBS 2006), Boston, September 4-6, 2006)

The SEAT project (Smart tEchnologies for stress free Air Travel) looks into integration of sensing into a airplane seat set-up. Having seats is a real set-up allows easy testing of ideas and realistic testing in early phases of the project. This setup made me think again more about an automotive setup in my next lab.