Yang Zhang

Objects engaged by users' hands contain rich contextual information for their strong correlation with user activities. Tools such as toothbrushes and wipes indicate cleansing and sanitation, while mice and keyboards imply work. Much research has been endeavored to sense hand-engaged objects to supply wearables with implicit interactions or ambient computing with personal informatics. We propose TextureSight, a smart-ring sensor that detects hand-engaged objects by detecting their distinctive surface textures using laser speckle imaging on a ring form factor. We conducted a two-day experience sampling study to investigate the unicity and repeatability of the object-texture combinations across routine objects. We grounded our sensing with a theoretical model and simulations, powered it with state-of-the-art deep neural net techniques, and evaluated it with a user study. TextureSight constitutes a valuable addition to the literature for its capability to sense passive objects without emission of EMI or vibration and its elimination of lens for preserving user privacy, leading to a new, practical method for activity recognition and context-aware computing.

The increase of distributed embedded systems has enabled pervasive sensing, actuation, and information displays across buildings and surrounding environments, yet also entreats huge cost expenditure for energy and human labor for maintenance. Our daily interactions, from opening a window to closing a drawer to twisting a doorknob, are great potential sources of energy but are often neglected. Existing commercial devices to harvest energy from these ambient sources are unaffordable, and DIY solutions are left with inaccessibility for non-experts preventing fully imbuing daily innovations in end-users. We present E3D, an end-to-end fabrication toolkit to customize self-powered smart devices at low cost. We contribute to a taxonomy of everyday kinetic activities that are potential sources of energy, a library of parametric mechanisms to harvest energy from manual operations of kinetic objects, and a holistic design system for end-user developers to capture design requirements by demonstrations then customize augmentation devices to harvest energy that meets unique lifestyle.