Design Optimization of Pressure Sensing Floor for Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use. Humans communicate with each other, intentionally or unintentionally, using various interpersonal communication modes such as static and dynamic full-body, limb, and hand gestures, facial expressions, speech and sounds, and haptics, just to name a few. It is natural to design human-computer interaction systems with which users can communicate using these interpersonal communication modes. To this end, multimodal human-computer interaction (MMHCI) systems are receiving increasing attention recently. An overview of the recent advances of MMHCI can be found in (Jaimes and Sebe, 2007). Our research mainly focuses on movement analysis based on visual and pressure sensing for movement based MMHCI, which read the movement of user(s), and respond accordingly through real-time visual and audio feedback. Such movement based MMHCI systems have immediate applications in a number of areas with significant impact on our daily lives, including biomedical, e.g. rehabilitation of stroke patients (Chen, et al., 2006), culture and arts, e.g. studying patterns and cues in complex dance performances, and interactive dance performances (Qian, et al., 2004), K-12 education, e.g. collaborative and embodied learning (Birchfield, et al., 2006), sports (e.g. analyzing and improving athletic performance based on weight distributions), and security (e.g. movement based smart surveillance systems), just to name a few.