Umbillicus

Concept 
Our concept for Umbillicus came from a news report in which, a child had fallen while under the supervision of a babysitter; this fall went unreported to the parents. During a subsequent doctor's visit, the doctor discovered that the child had suffered brain damage from the fall and was diagnosed with autism.
Artifact
Our project consists of two wearable pieces, a receiver piece for the adults and a data gatherer and transmitter piece for the child.


The child's wearable contains a FSR (Force Sensing Resistor) and Lilypad tri-direactional accelerometer connect into an Arduino board which transmits through a Radio Frequency (RF) transmitter. The FSR and accelerometer combine to detect and verify the type and severity of falls. The accelerometer is used to detect the amount of deceleration which would indicate a the size of a fall. Based on the values of the accel- and deceleration the program can also detect the direction of the fall. In the event of a backwards fall onto the buttocks the FSR data is used to confirm the severity of the fall, this addition of the FSR is a result of the opinion that falling onto the buttocks is a less severe fall than any other of the same force. Once the system detects a fall which goes beyond a predetermined threshold based off of observation of children falling, the system outputs the corresponding Sting character to to be transmitted to the adult's wearable.


The adult piece consists of four vibration motors which are connected to an Arduino board and a RF receiver. When the program receives a String message from the baby's wearable the program decodes it and outputs the correct vibration. The vibration motors are places one each arm between the bicep and tricep as well as on the lower back along the spine and on the sternum. These locations were chosen since they can both easily represent direction as well as allow for easy detection by the wearer. This ease of detection comes from the lack of soft tissue in these areas, soft tissue would absorb the vibration and allow for detection errors by the wearer, a missed communication about a fall could prove to have long term effects.

Technical Schematic

Documentation Video

Document: http://www.sfu.ca/~ctc11/IAT320/IAT320_FinalReport.pdf

Final Project

For the final project my team consists of Aldrich Tan, Kennet Kwok, Ashley Lee, Stephanie Wiriahardja. We will be creating two wearable interfaces. One of which will be for a toddler to wear the other for their parents.


The toddler's wearable will be used to detect sudden accelerations or decelerations which would occur in falls as well as the resulting impact from them. These sensations would be transmitted to the wearable of the parent allowing them to experience these events. In doing so, the parent would be more aware of the toddler as they are not able to watch them all the time and small incidents may go unnoticed resulting in long term damage.


This idea was inspired by a story in which a toddler was under the care of a babysitter and suffered a fall. This fall went unreported to the parents. The parents later discovered that the infant had suffered a brain injury from this unreported incident and it is still not clear what the long term effects will be for the child.


Our goal is to increase the connection of parents to their children in a way that reduces interpretation of the events that occur. We intend to use both vibration and linear actuation devices to produce discomfort and possibly pressure to the parent. Our device should produce clear, physical messages from the toddler to the parent in the event of a fall.

Automated Corset Shirt

 Our Automated Corset-style Shirt was an exploration into gesture based soft circuit design. It was intended to explore the gestures people generally make when they are cold. We found that when people are cold they tend to tighten up there arms, holding them close to the body.

Our design took this gesture and used soft-switches built into the shirt. These switches detected whether or not the wearer's arms are being held close to the body. To confirm that the user is indeed experiencing cold and not receiving outside pressure on their body or causing any other type of false-positive, we decided to use a temperature sensor also connected into the Arduino board. In order for the Arduino to decide the air temperature should be considered cold we exposed ourselves to different temperatures until we felt that we needed to either go to a warmer place or add a layer of clothing. We found that our average cool temperature was 15 Degrees Celcius. This temperature then became our lower bound for beginning to close the shirt.

In order for us to eliminate as much temperature cross-contamination from the wearer as possible, we placed the temperature sensor on the back side of the shoulder, as far from any major blood vessels as possible as well as being in the least restrictive place in regards to movement and interacting with others.

When the correct situation is detected the system calls upon two continuous rotation servo motors which are attached to a shoe lace running down the back of the shirt. The amount of rotation outputted to the servos was a ratio of the current temperature to our final closed temperature, 5 Degrees Celcius.
The trouble with using continuous servo motors is that they can have a problem finding their centre position which was the call that needs to be made in order to stop the rotation. In order to counter this we had to use a different method of rotation which does not work in degrees of rotation but in microseconds and sending electricity or not. Unfortunately by doing this method we sacrificed the ability to discreetly control rotation without using a conversion algorithm.

We ran into a few physical problems when installing the servos and soft-switches. With regards to the use of conductive thread we ran into difficulty as the natural resistance of the conductive thread reduced the amount of current that could be detected by the Arduino board as well as limited the already low amount of power that could be outputted to the servos. In a future iterations of this design the use of an external battery pack to boost power to the servos. The last two major problems had to do with the servos themselves. First, attaching servos of that size to the shirt proved to be beyond our scope at the time of fabrication. We later received the advice to build large pockets which can spread the weight of the servos over a larger surface area of the shirt. Lastly, once of the servos that we had used caused us problems in that it would not listen to the program and reverse its direction of rotation. This problem created a huge delay in work as much of our time went into troubleshooting the program and not the hardware, which was the actual cause of the problem. It turned out that this servo's potentiometer, which sets the 0 point of rotation for the servo, had been broken. This part of the servo being broken caused it to be unable to find its 0 point by which it had based its rotational direction.

A special reminder to anyone using equipment they are unfamiliar with: "No matter if it's new or used, always read the users manual. It will save you a lot of program troubleshooting and may give you some tricks to better work with the device.

Embodiment

During last lecture I started thinking about the future of embodiment. It seems to me that, in terms of gaming embodiment (part of the lecture), that for gaming to become more embodied they need to increase the amount of equipment that is needed to game. To me this poses a problem of making gaming an intrusive process of putting on the gaming interface over the current process of grabbing a controller and starting. With this in mind the problem that needs to be solved before embodiment can become a viable method of game interaction is making the feedback interfaces non-cumbersome and easy to put on. Until this problem is solved we are left with either looking like fools wearing "Robocop" suits or looking like fools kicking soccer balls that don't really exist.

MAX Bongos Continued

The submitted version of the MAX Bongos went quite well as we could visualize areas for advancement and improvement. In continuing to work on this project it would be an interesting use of embodiment to detect the stance of the user and change the drum sounds to match the actual drumming style.

-----------------------------------UPDATE-----------------------------------------
I decided to try out the change object and it works like a charm. The program registers 1 hit and then waits for another one no more buzzing!!!

MAX Bongos

I am simply loving the cv.jit library for Max. It is really interesting to make simple interfaces and interactions much like that of the recently released Kinect, minus the animal petting games.

 

The Musical Bongo Interface which is being explored by my team should be an interesting experience as we will attempt to not just call pre-recorded sound files but to use some scaled down algorithms to create sound in our program. We are hoping to achieve this by detecting the speed and placement of each hit. Speed controlling the volume output level and placement more controlling the pitch and envelope of the sound. Even if these calculations don't create a perfect representation of the actual instrument I hope it will come close enough to not sound like any old sine wave. It'll be helpful using my bongos to do fine tuning on the pitch and timbre algorithms.