Smart environments without cameras: Electrical Field Sensing for Human-Computer Interaction Ubiquitous Computing Seminar FS2014 Student report

In modern smart environments, traditional interaction devices such as keyboards or mice are often not available or at least not desirable. In some of today’s devices, touch sensing and computer vision for gesture recognition enables a more natural way of interacting. However, high cost, high bur-den of instrumenting the environment and other disadvan-tages limit their applications for pervasive computing sys-tems. One other possible method for the same functionality might be electrical field sensing. This work will highlight some disadvantages of computer vision systems for gesture recognition and give an overview of the state of the art in electric field sensing for Human-Computer Interaction. A focus will be set on passive electric field sensing where three research projects will be presented that try to leverage electri-cal field sensing for touch location detection, gesture recog-nition, activity recognition and location classification by in-troducing different methods for capturing gestures with elec-tric fields and evaluating the robustness of these methods