UCL Interaction Centre Seminar - Classifying and Measuring Unencumbered Hand Gestures

Speaker: Professor Mike Fraser, University of Bristol

I will present recent work exploring how to identify and measure hand gestures using sensors worn on the upper arm or wrist working towards interactive input and prosthetic control applications. Previous work has identified computer vision approaches to unencumbered gesture tracking, and these approaches are intermittently accurate but typically suffer from occlusion, and won't work for amputees. I'll present work in which deformations in the arm's skin and muscles are used to measure gestures instead, through electromyography, pressure sensing or ultrasound imaging. Some sensors are more sensitive to finger movements while others better detect wrist movement, suggesting novel sensing combinations to detect a range of unencumbered gestures.

About the speaker: Mike Fraser is head of the Bristol Interaction Group, Faculty Research Director for Engineering and Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Bristol. Current projects include an EPSRC established career fellowship developing the use of conducting and semi-conducting polymers in interaction design. With a background across computing and social sciences, he has published in ACM Transactions on CHI, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, CSCW Journal, ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST and UbiComp.

Time: 3pm Wednesday 25th January 2017

Venue: 66-72 Gower Street, Room 4.05.