Personal mobile health – Nintendo GlucoBoy

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Recently an interesting mobile health product was launched: the glucoboy – http://www.glucoboy.com/ . It is designed as an add-on to the Nintendo Gameboy. The basic idea is to combine blood glucose measuring for children and video gaming.

This product shows that an in-depth understanding of the problem domain can create novel interactive products (in this case the idea was conceived by a parent with a direct insight into the problem). For user interface engineering we see again a clear value of contextual enquiry (or at least contextual understanding) combined with a clever utilization of technology.

Prototypes of unconventional user interfaces

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In Linz the students of the course unconventional user interfaces showed their first set of functional prototypes. The topics are related to interactive mirrors, context-aware advertisement posters, healthy rear-seat entertainment, and text input while driving. The assignment was to create a system that allows creating an authentic user experience for the concept. The technical solutions were very different and ranged from a dismantled keyboard to a system using a micro-controller, from a two-way mirror with display behind to direction detection in front of an advert. Even though the prototypes were fairly simple most of them showed impressively how much of an idea a functional prototype can transport.

Just in time train schedule?

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Thought experiment: if we have the same number of trains we have at the moment and we let them travel as we do at the moment – but without time tables (basically a train is always on time – it is there when it arrives – similar to today). Customers would have real time access to all trains and the system could provide estimates when a certain train is where – perhaps with a confidence interval and probabilities of connections and travel times (obviously with an understandable user interface).

Would this be a better or worse model of public transport?

… and by the way the coach I was in has the IP address 192.168.97.181 and runs DOS 😉

Talk at the expert meeting on RFID and ubicomp

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In Frankfurt there was today an expert meeting on RFID and ubicomp organized by the Fraunhofer ISI. The purpose was a discussion about the impact of RFID technologies. The organizers will use our input to inform the creation of a document of technology assessment for the German parliament. The majority of the participants came from companies developing RFID technology or system.
In the first part of my talk “RFID and Beyond” I highlighted results from two workshops where I was a co-organizer: PTA2006 and Pertec2007 held at the Pervasive and Percom conferences. The results were also published in 2 papers in the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine, see [1] and [2]. After this I showed some future visions and scenarios, namely the Smart-Its & MediaCup (foto from Birgit at Teco) [3], the SensorKnife [4], and the aware goods project [5]. Michael Müller extended the idea of the first aware goods project with a mobile phone based prototype – which we still have not written up for publication.

For me the technology assessment in Germany seems still often very much centred on threats and looks much less at opportunities. Looking at developments in Asia and in particular in Korea (e.g. U-City) I hope politics in Germany will in the future more often see the positive sides, too. Technology assessment can become a means to find opportunities and ideas to support innovation. For me it seems that a lot of the risks people attribute to RFID are not based on scientific results – is appears rather media induced… Positive cases such as wireless key systems and transport tickets (basically RFID technology) are in widespread use without much problems and great value for users – but not present in the public discussion.

One interesting estimated was that about 200 parts of the several thousands (e.g. safety related parts, large parts, parts that are often stolen, expensive parts) per car will tagged with RFID in the next 10 years to ease logistics, production and maintenance.

[1] Schmidt, A.; Spiekermann, S.; Gershman, A.; Michahelles, F., „Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing„, Pervasive Computing, IEEE , vol.5, no.3pp. 91- 93, c3, July-Sept. 2006.

[2] Michahelles, F.; Thiesse, F.; Schmidt, A.; Williams, J. R.: Pervasive RFID and Near Field Communication Technology. In: IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 94-96, c3, Jul., 2007.

[3] Hans-Werner Gellersen, Albrecht Schmidt, Michael Beigl: Multi-Sensor Context-Awareness in Mobile Devices and Smart Artifacts. MONET 7(5): 341-351 (2002)

[4] Matthias Kranz, Albrecht Schmidt, Alexis Maldonado, Radu Bogdan Rusu, Michael Beetz, Benedikt Hörnler, Gerhard Rigoll: Context-aware kitchen utilities. Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007: 213-214

[5] Anke Thede, Albrecht Schmidt, Christian Merz: Integration of Goods Delivery Supervision into E-commerce Supply Chain. WELCOM 2001: 206-218

Multi-touch displays seen as great opportunity

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In our course “case studies in pervasive computing” we re-build systems that are described in the research literature and try to improve them or to apply them to new domains. This term the topic is on multi-touch displays. Starting out with Jeff Han’s paper “Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection” we think about novel interaction methods for large screens. And after some initial problems (filter in the web cam we used) we have a first hardware prototype that shows the FTIR effect. The page of Thomas M. Brand is a good starting point if you too think of a DIY-project.

On Monday Giulio Jacucci from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology told me that they set up a start-up that has an new interesting and different way of doing multi-touch displays – and they look into enormous sizes of displays, up to 16 meters long. Their web page is http://www.multitouch.fi/. Perhaps we should try to get some of there technology for next term – would save us some serious drilling, soldering and polishing…

Interactive Mirrors – an upcoming topic beyond the idea?

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At the CHI PC-meeting in Amsterdam I talked to a number of people – and it seems we are not the only one’s who are interested in interactive mirrors. It seems that breaking the physical limitations in time and space, a convention mirror imposes, creates some interest within the research community.

I talked to Boris de Ruyter about the Philips mirror project in the homelab and learned from Bo Begole about their work on interactive mirrors at PARC. It may be interesting to propose a workshop on interactive mirrors at one of the upcoming conference to get the people together looking into this topic.
In the hotel in Schiphol there was a mirror display for adverts. It did not really link any functionality of the mirror with the display, but nevertheless it was a aesthetically pleasing installation

Reset/reboot is ubiquitous – or my worst train ride so far

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What have learned to do when our computer or phone does not work anymore? Easy just reboot it. A colleague recently told me his rental car broke down (basically did not work anymore) but after resetting it, it worked fine again. When he told me I found this pretty strange – ok the radio or opening the car boot – but essential functions related to driving?

Today I was travelling on an ICE high-speed train to Amsterdam for the CHI-Notes committee meeting and shortly after we left Germany the train lost speed and became slower and just rolled out. Then can an interesting announcement: “Sorry it seems we do not get power anymore – but we think it is not a big problem. We reset the train and then we are on our way again”. The reboot did not work 🙁 so they told us we needed to another engine. Perhaps there was more to reboot (e.g. the train power grid nation wide?)…

Extrapolating in the future I can imagine a lot of things we will need to reboot, e.g. your shoes, your furniture, your house, your augmented sense, and your implants – or should we take more care in developing things?

At some point they decided we can not wait on the train and we had to get off the train outside the station (using small ladder) while it was pouring with rain. The left us than waiting for 2 hours (in the rain) – basically till we found ourselves another means of transport (overall delay about 5 hours). This made me realize that a Nokia N95 with GPS is probably really good while travelling – if I would have had it with me I could have called a taxi to where I was 😉

More about train rides… Some more traditional technologies however work very well – this week I was already once stuck on a train were a passenger pulled the emergency train and went of the train – somewhere in the middle of nowhere…

Keynote speaker at TEI’08: Prof. Hiroshi Ishii

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Prof. Hiroshi Ishii from the MIT Media Laboratory, kindly accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker of TEI’08 in Bonn. We are absolutely delighted that he will come to the conference. Looking back at last year’s proceedings of TEI, and seeing the references in the papers, it is obvious how much he has inspired and shaped this research field.

I recently learned that Prof. Ishii has lived and worked in Bonn in 1987-1988 at GMD (which became later Fraunhofer. He was then a Post-Doc and worked topics related to CSCW.

There are so many paper of tangibles media group one really has to read. If you have today little time watch this one: topodo.

Talk at the opening of the Fraunhofer IAO interaction lab

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The Fraunhofer institute IAO opened today a new interaction lab in Stuttgart under the topic interaction with all senses. Prof. Spath, director of the Fraunhofer IAO, made a strong argument for new user interfaces. In his talk he discussed adaptive cruse control in cars as an example for user interface challenges.

My talk on “implicit interaction – smart living in smart environments” argues for a sensible mix of user centred design and technology driven innovation. As one example I used the Sensor-Knife which Matthias Kranz implemented.

Prof. Jürgen Ziegler, a colleague at the University of Duisburg-Essen who was previously at IAO, showed in his talk a short video of a “galvanic vestibular stimulation” GVS explored by NTT (SIGGRAPH 2005 Demo) to highlight trends and indicate at the same time ethical problems that can arise when we interfere with human senses.