School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science Wearable Creativity From the lab to the Real World
www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk
Engaging QMUL and its knowledge base
How do we do this?
QMUL is committed to fostering relationships with industry and the 3rd sector that better understand the needs of our partners and translate our research into competitive and effective solutions. We achieve this by fostering partnerships that deliver commercial and strategic benefit in a well-structured and pre-competitive environment. The Business Development team is a point of contact for industry and the 3rd sector who wish to engage with QMUL and its research community.
• Explore opportunities that match the needs of their organisation with our expertise.
What we do?
We help Business partners to:
• Liaise with funding agencies and knowledge networks to leverage support for our collaboration. • Develop partnerships and strategic alliances with academics and the College as a whole. • Manage relationships to deliver both research impact and business-led innovation.
We connect industry to researchers to:
Who to contact?
• Accelerate the delivery of cutting edge research for application in industry
To discuss your requirements and collaboration opportunities, please contact:
• Navigate the breadth and depth of research at QMUL and facilitate your journey with us to realise the potential impact of our academic research.
Kalpana Chaturvedi email:
[email protected] Baljinder Ghoman email:
[email protected] Charlie Ellis email:
[email protected]
• Coordinate the technical, financial and contractual negotiations
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships
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Contents
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) 4 Research Nishtha Chopra Christine Farion Berit Greinke Katrin Hansel Matthew Jarvis Nanda Khaorapapong Antonella Mazonni Evan Morgan Yulia Silina
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School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) As one of the top 20 computer science and electronic engineering departments in the UK, we are internationally recognised for our pioneering and ground-breaking research, award-winning teaching, and innovative public engagement. Our outstanding resources include state-of-the-art recording and postproduction studios, antenna, EEG, and augmented human interaction laboratories. We have 150 members of academic and research staff and a community of around 3,100 students based in the UK and China.
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Research in the School is at the cuttingedge; we work on core developments and novel technologies, making meaningful and long-lasting contributions that apply to real-world problems. Our research is focused in key areas led by internationally leading researchers. We engage with industry partners and academic colleagues around the world in a variety of sectors and disciplines. Our research has left indelible marks in areas as diverse as: the foundations of programming languages, digital signal processing, parallel computing, augmented human interaction, and intelligent systems. For more information please visit www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/research
Wearable Technologies @ QMUL Wearable technology research at QMUL attracted significant attention in recent years resulting in multiple large-scale collaborations with Innovate UK, Digital Shoreditch and various digital creative SMEs in the region. Our research in the wearable domain is multidisciplinary in nature base do fusion of ides and innovations from the art, media, design, fashion, materials sciences, human interaction, psychology, data science and novel electronic sensor designs. Our wearable solutions are applied to various areas including fashion, connected jewellery, smart textile, healthcare and wellbeing tracking with feedback, nano-scale communication inside the human body, music cognition, social communications, entertainment, education and many more. Based on our excellent research, we are invited to participate as challenge partner for the upcoming Innovate UK IC Tomorrow Wearable Call 2015 and also contribute to the Digital Shoreditch Festival 2015 (QMUL is a partner).
For more information on our wearable research please contact: Dr Akram Alomainy (SMIEEE, MIET) – Wearable Technology Research Lead and Senior lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, QMUL and the Industry Strategy Coordinator. email:
[email protected] www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~akram
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Research
Nishtha Chopra
Description:
Research Group: Antennas & Electromagnetics
[email protected]
Nano-technology has received great progress since its proposal specifically for biomedical applications. It is believed that the next generation of wearable technology and smaller size like nanosensor network will be operating at higher frequencies such as millimetre wave and terahertz frequencies (0.1 – 10 THz). This will offer a new set of applications not only for imaging, but also for sensing and communicating. As a potential and promising application in healthcare monitoring, the technology could be realized when engineered information flow can be controlled at human level. The project very well accommodates the need for understanding the electromagnetic properties of human skin and nanocommunication channel propagation in the THz range. Results show that the capacity can reach as high as Tera-bits per second at the level of millimeter, which paves the road for the application of THz wave for nano-communications.
Miss Nishtha Chopra is a strong believer of the saying, “Spread the knowledge of light”. Her research is an interesting blend of electronics and medical, which aims to characterize and understand Nanoscale Communication for HealthCare Applications. She is a science enthusiast and enjoys communicating about the best of technology we have around us. She has organized various scientific activities during her undergraduate degree in India and now aims to achieve the same during her PhD in UK. Her work is on Nanonetworks for Healthcare Monitoring Applications under the supervision of Dr. Akram Alomaimy.
Project Title: Characterising Skin-based NanoCommunications at THz for Healthcare Monitoring Applications
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Nano and Molecular scale communication for future healthcare and medical monitoring applications www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk 7
Research
Christine Farion Research Group: Cognitive Science (CogSci) http://christinefarion.com
[email protected] Christine has been working in creative fields for many years. She loves to build physical systems using hardware and software, which may sense or respond to our relationship with a physical world. A focus on hardware devices being integrated into everyday objects that feels natural to the user (physical computing) is a priority, and she has been making prototypes that satisfy both a useful and aesthetic need. The last few years her research has focused on forgetfulness, distributed cognition, embedded/seamless systems and HCI.
Project Title: Message Bag
Description: Do you ever forget important items? Keys? Wallet? Forgetting items typically means my day will be “off” or in some way it will be messed up if I forget an essential item, this could be my keys, cash, Oyster Card or similar.... when we forget, we feel bad. The goal of the devices I’m creating will be that our bags can communicate to us 8 www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk
what is inside. The device will help us to check using a radio frequency system that we have those essential items with us. The aim is also without adding any extra strain or new routine to our everyday routines. Message Bag explores a contactless system, turning our bags into smart objects, allowing them to communicate to us the items they contain. The motivation for the work is to reduce feelings of anxiety, stress, embarrassment and shame that can occur when we forget. Initially these prototypes were created using off the shelf components but as the work has progressed so too has the mechanism embedded. These are now being modified to have a prototype circuit board with the components embedded. How does Message Bag work? Using a simple tag system, our essential items are given ‘tags’ that can then be read by an integrated radio frequency identification reader (RFID). When you scan your tagged item simply by placing it in your bag, a corresponding light is lit or turned off depending on if we have the item in our bag. There is also an audible ‘beep’ to acknowledge the item was scanned as well as a gentle vibration. You can then leave your bag ready on a table and this way we can look across a room and see immediately if the items are packed or not. This eliminates constant checking, double checking and worry if we will forget something.
One of the prototypes of an embedded item recognition system
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Research
Berit Greinke Research Group: Antennas & Electromagnetics www.beritgreinke.com
[email protected] Berit’s work is multidisciplinary, informed by research and practice within design, art, physics, materials science and electronic engineering. Originally trained as a textile designer and artist, she gained an MA in Design for Textile Futures, and is currently studying towards a PhD, investigating fabrication technologies for microwave textile metamaterials.
Description: Metamaterials are composite materials engineered to guide electromagnetic waves along a predetermined path, allowing for levels of control over the conduction of these fields that were previously not technologically feasible. For example, a negative refractive index material, the pioneering metamaterial that was theoretically proposed in 1968 and experimentally verified for the first time only 30 years later, is composed of many small, symmetrically repeated metallic and nonmetallic structures. Together, the patterned structure is able to bend light “the wrong way”, inspiring scientists to propose designs for invisibility and shapeshifting cloaks, and perfect lenses. Using the same principle, structurally larger microwave metamaterials 10 www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk
can bend electromagnetic waves of lower frequencies, such as the waves emitted by mobile phones and WiFi devices. Microwave metamaterials are used today to develop many practical engineering devices, such as flat satellite dishes and small wearable antennas. This project investigates fabrication technologies for textile microwave metamaterials using an interdisciplinary approach. Three-dimensional metatextiles have been developed from a textile design and craft perspective, integrating traditional textile techniques such as screen printing and pleating, along with established engineering techniques such as chemical etching and vacuum deposition. Processes have been paired with presentday computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) technologies such as digital embroidery, laser engraving and inkjet printing, resulting in e-textile prototypes which refract microwaves in highly innovative ways. The work contributes to both scientific knowledge and provides a practical way in which the technological and creative potential of metamaterials can be introduced to the design community. Due to the novelty of this field, the functionality and potential of metamaterials have not yet been fully researched, providing exciting opportunities for designers to propose futuristic yet realisable design scenarios.
Chemically etched copper on cotton, Metatextiles 2014
Photo Credit: Richard Kelly
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Research
Katrin Hänsel Research Group: Cognitive Science (CogSci)
[email protected] Katrin Hänsel is a PhD student at the Queen Mary University of London. Her current research focus lies on the use of smart wearable sensors and devices for the promotion of health and wellbeing. During her master’s project at the Glasgow University she designed a prototype for an interactive semi-public display to enhance social connectedness and awareness in co-located teams.
Project Details: There is high potential of the tracking of health data on a daily basis for identifying optimal parameters for own health promotion and improvements in fitness, wellbeing, and performance. Smart sensors and wearable devices can track different kinds of data, can help to find out correlations and therefore may enable one to make statements about personal health influencing parameters. Not just parameters of the user, but also parameters of the surrounding environment might be influential. Smart representation of the data and
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the correlations can support the user by becoming aware of these influential parameters on the health of the individual and possibly help to adjust the own behaviour accordingly. But sensors and wearable devices not just make it a lot easier to keep track of these influencing parameters, but also raise issues concerning good usability, good user experience and privacy of sensible data. This research project focuses on the use and development of such smart sensors and wearable devices and the question how they can raise awareness and improve overall wellbeing and health.
Detail of wearables components
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Research
Matthew Jarvis Research Group: Cognitive Science, QMUL www.mattjarvis.co.uk
[email protected] Matthew earned a Masters of science in Media Technology at Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands when starting his work on haptic wearable computing and is now undertaking his PhD at the Queen Mary University of London’s Media and Arts Technology Doctoral Training Centre, where his subject is detecting the phenomenon of exhilaration using wearable tech.
Project Title: The Hapti-Harness: Towards an Understanding of a Tactile Feedback System for use in Multitudinous Environments
Description: How is the experience to feel data? What is it to evoke an extra layer of awareness using a type of tactile reflex? Could a state of continuous partial attention be especially useful for certain information? These are some questions which have led us to research the introduction of a haptic feedback garment as an appropriate medium for artistic expression and creative application.
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In order to experience, describe and study the appropriate form and the potential of such a medium, we built a device we named the Hapti-Harness; a wireless, multi-modal vibration based haptic feedback system for use on the torso. This enables exploration using multiple types of information. Once we built the hardware, we developed a communication framework and number of applications to control the effects of the device and read information from it. These applications are categorised into themes, proposing alternate directions for experimentation of vibration based sensory modalities as a medium. We asked people to use it and we recorded their experiences. The impact that the Hapti-Harness had into our participants reveals a great potential for further study of the proposed medium outside the already established fields that have been researched so far.
Hapti-Harness and work in progress
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Research
Nanda Khaorapapong
Description:
Research Group: Cognitive Science, Antennas http://nanda000.wordpress.com/
[email protected]
Icebreaker jacket v2.0 is designed as a study tool in using “natural” interface of technology to understand the behaviour of shy persons when meeting with a stranger. The notion of social object, together with the principles of Calm and context-aware computing is employed to generate the concept of “subtle” sensing and social notification mechanism to the technology. A near-field communication system embedded in the cuff enables the jacket to recognise two wearers during their handshaking, thereafter it calculates social compatibility scores based on the wearers’ profiles and preferences. The score is used to control a textile-thermochromic painted badge to gradually reveal their social compatibility in a non-obtrusive means.
Nanda is in the process of completing her PhD; the core subject matter offering a unique analysis of the cross-over between social science, design and electronic engineering. She’s interested in both subtle and tangible elements of technology that facilitates user intuitive interaction between people and machines. As a techno artistpractitioner, she enjoys collaborating on projects that require interface and interaction designs, as well as computing and circuiting. Prototyping is her most favourite area of expertise.
Project Title: Icebreaker jacket v2.0
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A feature diagram of Icebreaker jacket v2.0
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Research Antonella Mazzoni Research Group: C4DM
[email protected] Antonella has a BSc in Computer Science and is currently enrolled in a PhD in Media and Arts Technology. Her interests lie in Human Interaction, HCI, Interaction Design, Interactive Systems, Wearable Computing, and Film Art. Lately she’s been focusing on how technology, especially wearables, can improve or create new users experience.
Project Title: “Feel the sound: helping the hearing impaired experience music in a movie”
Description: Film is a multimodal form of entertainment that blends together audio and visual stimuli to tell a story and to create an emotional experience for those watching it. Both the audio and the visual elements in a movie are essential in creating the viewer experience, and some argued that these should be accessible to everyone enjoying this form of entertainment, but how for deaf movie lovers even though captioning or sign language can make speech more accessible, music and background noises are not included in subtitles. Also, in silent movies music is the main element for communicating emotions, so those not able to hear are left out. 18 www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk
Sensing the music is therefore very important as music transmits emotions that cannot be communicated by other stimuli such as the visual, and particularly in the context of watching a movie if the music element is missing the outcome experience for the viewer is different from the one intended by the film director. Antonella’s study aims to enhance the musical experience of hearing-impaired people as well as normal-hearing people while watching a movie. How different is the experience of watching a movie for a hearing-impaired person? And what can we do to make the experience the same as for a normalhearing person? How do deaf people experience music? There is little research on how to enhance musical experience for hearing-impaired people, and some deaf musicians say to experience music as vibrations they feel on their body while playing an instrument. Two previous studies in this field presented the design of a vibrating haptic chair as a solution, but this research argues the affordability and the freedom of movement of such project. This research aims to design an affordable wearable haptic device that will give the user freedom of movement and will allow hearing-impaired people to feel the music while watching a movie, as well as providing the normal hearing with a new music experience.
User wearing version 3 of the prototype while watching the movie ‘Amelie’
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Research
Evan Morgan Research Group: Multimedia and Vision (MMV) www.you-rhythmic.com
[email protected] Evan previously studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College, where he collaborated with the Royal College of Music to analyse the physiological aspects of performance anxiety in musicians. His PhD research at Queen Mary University investigates how modern wearable sensors can be used to understand and improve interactions between performing musicians.
Project Title: LuminUs: Illuminating the ‘us’ in collaborative music making
Description: Modern sensors allow us to interact with computer devices through touch, motion and more recently bio-signals such as heart rate and brain activity. Our research focuses on how wearable sensors can be used to develop technologies that support and enrich the social aspects of co-present interactions between people. In particular, we are interested in applications in the domain of collaborative music making. New music technologies are already transforming this field. The 20 www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk
vast majority of these technologies focus on a single-user paradigm, and are not designed with much consideration for collaborative interaction. Based upon experimental findings, we have designed a prototype device called the LuminUs, which specifically targets the inter-personal and social aspects of collaborative music making. The LuminUs is a small and simple lighting display, designed to be positioned close to a musician’s instrument. It has two modes of operation – motion feedback, and gaze feedback. In the motion feedback mode the device uses small wireless accelerometers to measure body movement. These movements are then processed and displayed on the LuminUs, allowing each musician to see a visual representation of their collaborator’s motion. In the gaze feedback mode we use eye-tracking glasses to detect when one musician is glancing towards the other. The LuminUs then visually notifies the musician who is being glanced at. We are undertaking experiments to investigate the impact of the LuminUs on collaborative music making. The findings from these experiments will enable us to further develop both the software algorithms and hardware behind our design. Furthermore, we are currently using commercially available accelerometers and eye-tracking devices, but it may be necessary to design custom wearable devices that are better suited for musicians.
The LuminUs: a device that provides musicians with live feedback on the behaviour and emotions of their fellow performers
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Research Yulia Silina Research Group: Media & Arts Technology/ Cognitive Science www.yuliasilina.com
[email protected] Yulia is a researcher, designer and artisan with interest in computational jewellery and wearable devices. Setting principles of Emotional and User-Centred Design for Human-Computer Interaction within historical precedents, Yulia’s research examines how wearables could rectify the emotional void created when families, friends and loved ones move away from each other
Project Title: The Distant Heart
Description: The long distance relationships are a prevalent cause of stress and can generate a profound sense of longing and nostalgia. It is common to use a variety of methods to stay in touch with each other. But despite wide availability of audio, video and written communications, it is not unusual for us to experience occasions when all we want is to share a moment with the loved-ones and let them know that we are thinking of them without having to say or write any words. It is equally important to know that the other person cares and thinks about
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one, even if they do not necessarily directly communicate such emotions in voice or writing. One of the cultural practices that allow individuals to intimately and meaningfully conjure up memories and presence of each other is an ancient practice of exchanging love-tokens and keepsakes such as wedding rings and pendent lockets. The rapid development of the new multidisciplinary field of computational jewelry (colloquially known as smart or digital jewelry) is on a brink of merging technological potential of wearables with aesthetic and cultural significance of jewellery. But as the field is young, there are many unanswered questions. The Distant Heart is a computational necklace, developed as a part of the research into rectifying the emotional void created when families, friends and loved ones move away from each other. The system was designed for two people that love and miss each-other, but are separated by distance. One of them would measure and share his or her heartbeat through a dedicated Twitter account, another would wear The Distant Heart necklace just as any other necklace. When the necklace wireless detects the shared heartbeat, it would have it revealed to the wearer, giving an intimate glimpse of the other person.and investigate other forms of modalities of interaction, levels of control, etiquette, reciprocity and so on.
Detail of The Distant Heart
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For further information contact: Dr Akram Alomainy (SMIEEE, MIET) – Wearable Technology Research Lead and Senior lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, QMUL and the Industry Strategy Coordinator. email:
[email protected] www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~akram
Any section of this publication is available in large print upon request. If you require this publication in a different accessible format we will endeavour to provide this where possible. For further information and assistance, please contact:
[email protected]; Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 5585. The information given in this publication is correct at the time of going to press. We reserve the right to modify or cancel any statement in it and accept no responsibility for the consequences of any such changes. For the most up-to-date information, please refer to the website qmul.ac.uk This prospectus has been printed on environmentally friendly material from well-managed sources.
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