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Designing Groundless Body Channel Communication Systems: Performance and Implications

Authors:

Gergely Vakulya,

Alanson Sample,

Thomas R. GrossAuthors Info & Claims

UIST '18: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Pages 683 - 695

https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242622

Published: 11 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Novel interactions that capacitively couple electromagnetic (EM) fields between devices and the human body are gaining more attention in the human-computer interaction community. One class of these techniques is Body Channel Communication (BCC), a method that overlays physical touch with digital information. Despite the number of published capacitive sensing and communication prototypes, there exists no guideline on how to design such hardware or what are the application limitations and possibilities. Specifically, wearable (groundless) BCC has been proven in the past to be extremely challenging to implement. Additionally, the exact behavior of the human body as an EM-field medium is still not fully understood today. Consequently, the application domain of BCC technology could not be fully explored. This paper addresses this problem. Based on a recently published general purpose wearable BCC system, we first present a thorough evaluation of the impact of various technical parameter choices and an exhaustive channel characterization of the human body as a host for BCC. Second, we discuss the implications of these results for the application design space and present guidelines for future wearable BCC systems and their applications. Third, we point out an important observation of the measurements, namely that BCC can employ the whole body as user interface (and not just hands or feet). We sketch several applications with these novel interaction modalities.

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Ding DLi YPan HLu YChen YXue GKostakos VKay JHoang T(2024)Enable Touch-based Communication between Laptop and SmartwatchCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677574(4-8)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
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Index Terms

Designing Groundless Body Channel Communication Systems: Performance and Implications
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction techniques
  2. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

UIST '18: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

October 2018

1016 pages

ISBN:9781450359481

DOI:10.1145/3242587

General Chairs:
Patrick Baudisch
Hasso-Plattner Institute, Germany
,
Albrecht Schmidt
LMU, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Andy Wilson
Microsoft Research, USA

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 11 October 2018

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UIST '18: The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

October 14, 2018

Berlin, Germany

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UIST '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 80 of 375 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Ding DLi YPan HLu YChen YXue GKostakos VKay JHoang T(2024)Enable Touch-based Communication between Laptop and SmartwatchCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677574(4-8)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3675094.3677574
Kong AKim DHarrison C(2024)Power-over-Skin: Full-Body Wearables Powered By Intra-Body RF EnergyProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676394(1-13)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654777.3676394
Yang XSayono JXu JZhang Y(2024)Interaction-Power Stations: Turning Environments into Ubiquitous Power Stations for Charging WearablesExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650769(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650769
Cobden RZeeshan MRoggen DPrance RPouryazdan A(2023)Characterisation of Wearable Electric-Field Communication Link for BAN Multimedia Applications2023 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom)10.1109/PERCOM56429.2023.10099133(262-269)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM56429.2023.10099133
Zeeshan MPouryazdan ACobden RWang SPrance RRoggen D(2022)Electric Field Short-range Over-the-air Communication for Wearable and IoT Applications with Off-the-shelf Microcontrollers2022 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM54355.2022.00044(251-260)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/WoWMoM54355.2022.00044
Sasaki ABan A(2022)Nearest Neighbor Classification of Binary Channel States for Secure Human Body CommunicationIEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement10.1109/TIM.2022.320979671(1-14)Online publication date: 2022
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Varga VVakulya GBuergisser BRiopelle NZund FSumner RGross TSample AKaltenbrunner MMurer MWolf KOakley I(2021)Real-Time Capture of Holistic Tangible InteractionsProceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3430524.3440658(1-15)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
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Kienzle WWhitmire ERittaler CBenko HKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)ElectroRing: Subtle Pinch and Touch Detection with a RingProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445094(1-12)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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